If you’re reading this site we feel safe in assuming that you have fond memories of the Wachowski siblings’ 1999 cyberpunk-meets-kung-fu epic The Matrix. Sure, its sequels couldn’t live up to the intensely high bar of quality set by that first movie, but they’re not at all relevant to this story, so for the next few minutes you all have permission to forget they exist.
Getting back to things we’re assuming about you, we also see it as quite likely that you are a fan of the games created by Valve Software. Whether you prefer the co-operative survival horror of the Left 4 Dead series or the wacky, colorful multiplayer shooter action of Team Fortress, the developer offers something for everyone, and in the relatively short time it has been producing games Valve’s various characters have become iconic figures in the world of gaming.
Now, thanks to the efforts of an amateur filmmaker using the YouTube handle “LiveCurious95,” these two disparate yet delicious flavors have come together in one surprisingly excellent vignette, dubbed “The Matrix Remaked.”
Using Valve’s free Source Filmmaker software, which allows users to create films using any assets from games built on Valve’s Source game engine (read: every game the company has released since Half-Life 2), Mr. or Mrs. LiveCurious95 has recreated the famous scene from The Matrix in which Neo and Trinity attempt to rescue Morpheus from a group of Agents who have been interrogating him in a high-rise office building. In case you’re unfamiliar with this moment in cinematic history, here’s the original version starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and enough CGI to suspend any disbelievers dozens of feet above the ground.
The really neat bit though is that instead of just rebuilding the scene using models of the actors from the film, The Matrix Remaked is populated entirely by Valve’s famous characters. Morpheus is portrayed by Team Fortress 2’s cyclopian Demoman, the Agents are all Medics and Neo and Trinity are played by Left 4 Dead 2’s Nick and Rochelle, respectively. Though the clip is backed by audio samples directly from The Matrix, all of the animation has been created in Source Filmmaker and while it’s not entirely uncommon to see a popular film being recreated within a video game engine, it’s not often that we see an attempt as successful as this one.
We’ve embedded the entire clip below for your convenience, and we urge you all to watch it. Even those of you who’ve never seen The Matrix before. Watch the original version linked above, then hit play on the video below and marvel at how utterly spot on this fan-made movie is when directly compared to its source material. We’d like to offer equal propers both to Valve for giving its devoted fans such a powerful piece of movie making software, and to LiveCurious95 for giving us a chance to revisit one of the best movies of the 90s.
