For years, video games have envied movies. Now they want to create them - editorial

For years

The technical demo of The Matrix Awakens - An Unreal Experience, which debuted in recent days, is a message: the gap between video games and films will be shorter and shorter. After years that video games have experienced - it must be admitted - an evident sense of inferiority compared to the film industry, trying at every opportunity to steal narrative mechanics and cultural references, in the near future the Unreal Engine 5 will break the thin thread that binds the two multimedia means, potentially overlapping them.

Let's be clear: seeing video games of the technical quality of The Matrix Awakens demo will be difficult. Because one thing is a city in which - albeit full of pedestrians, lights in real time and vehicles - almost nothing can be done; another is a complete videogame experience, with complex Artificial Intelligence dynamics and a whole physics that in the demo of the Unreal Engine 5, which aims to amaze with its visual impact, is missing in many parts.

For movies, the story is very different.

Neo reproduced in The Matrix Awakens, available for PS5 and Xbox Series X | S. In the meantime, it must be understood that video games (in a broader sense) do not need to be like movies: they just need to reproduce the experience. Just like virtual concerts, those organized in shared connected worlds like Fortnite and Roblox are not like regular concerts: there is no physical presence; it lacks the thrust of music into the body and the labored breathing of other people. But those who connected to the concerts of Lil Nas X, Ariana Grande and Travis Scott - and in the future will do so with the many other artists who want to cross this trend - did not ask themselves the problem.

The virtual concert is a simulacrum of concerts but it represents, if you like, a hybridization of the cross between the concert, the real one, and the videogame world: it is a new multimedia creature. This does not make the virtual concert, however, neither less intense nor less relevant for emotional purposes: the user is not passive in musical enjoyment but is active. Indeed, the interaction is the result of a series of new platforms and experiences that for a growing share of people is now essential: real-time chat in live coverage on Twitch; the alter ego to move in virtual concerts; the ability to drive a car like the Ferrari 296 GTB in Fortnite.

The same could happen, powered by Unreal Engine 5, in the movies. The opening scene of The Matrix Awakens, while short and very predictable, is spectacular enough to guarantee an audiovisual experience of great impact: what if this were the future of a share of film productions? Perhaps Epic Games' goal, which aims to create a metaverse, is just that. Neither movie nor video game: an experience in some ways new and in some ways familiar.

The introduction of The Matrix Awakens is in fact an interactive film created in Unreal Engine 5. Of course, expect a total replacement of the new films with these hybrid experiences is illusory: it won't be like that. But today the Unreal Engine is already used in many multimedia contents such as Westworld by HBO, while The Mandalorian by Disney and Superman & Lois by Zoic Studios are examples of how cinema and new television (that of big productions) are already exploiting. special effects enabled by the Unreal Engine. The technical demo of The Matrix Awakens means: we aim even higher.

A perhaps underestimated effect is that with the tools of the Unreal Engine 5 it will be possible to create a virtual model, thanks to the MetaHuman technology of Epic Games, for a movie; and then use that same model for a video game, which will perhaps expand the world or tell another integrative story.

A shared asset could represent a turning point in the production of an interconnected multimedia world, with films, TV series and video games supported by the Unreal Engine 5 sharing models and virtual environments. An interconnection so deep that it is, in fact, "unreal".

The Matrix Awakens includes over 7,000 buildings and more than 35,000 non-player characters on the streets. "What is real?" Asks Keanu Reeves' virtual reproduction at the beginning of The Matrix Awakens. The first The Matrix, in particular, plays with the concepts of perception, reality and illusion and in the future the illusion will be that of immortality; of actors who are always young because their virtual reproduction, the one generated by the technology of Unreal Engine 5 and its future versions, will not get old. Unreal Engine 5 could be the beginning of a revolution.