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Sony Online Entertainment has announced that they will be closing down The Matrix Online servers on July 31st, thus ending the four year long continuation of the Matrix saga. A friend of mine put it best: "I can only imagine how frustrated all four players feel about this."

But seriously, though. Despite the fact that it never became a huge hit, it was an ambitious undertaking to continue the movies' storyline in real time via an online video game. Apparently they killed off Morpheus. If there any of its players reading this, we'd like to hear from you.

The good news is that they're not being dicks about refunds.

As of June 1, 2009 any currently entitled active player with an account in billing will not be billed again. For players who have previously purchased prepaid subscription time via a multi-month subscription service, SOE game time card or other retail game time card that extends the service period past June 1, 2009, SOE will refund these accounts for the unused time and where indicated will mail refund checks to the current billing address on the account. Please be sure to update your email and physical address in your Station Account as this will be critical to the refund process.

Don't count on anyone hosting fan servers, either, because WB owns the copyright and hosting one would be illegal.

As a side note, now that it's been a whole decade since The Matrix came along and became a mainstay of modern pop culture, I couldn't help but wonder if perhaps the trilogy is still underrated by most, especially the sequels. The first movie admittedly never aged well for me, especially once you've move past the novelty of the leather and bullet time and live-action "anime" shots. It's a disposable action movie at best and a bad sci-fi at times (cue obligatory "Dark City did it better" comment). Revisiting the trilogy, I'd say Reloaded is the strongest of the three, a sentiment I don't see a lot of support for.

The Matrix Revolutions isn't any good, but I love its side-swipe ending, which gets a bad rap because their climax to the machine war was the cinematic equivalent of a shut down and restart to fix a freeze. Then there's the kumbaya man-machine peace treaty sunset. But that's what sets it apart from all the other tired technophobic "machine apocalypse" sci-fi. When The Matrix Online launched back in 2005, I wondered if it was ironic for them to make an MMORPG about people who jack out of computer simulations; but I suppose that wasn't the point of the series, was it? Rather than demonizing machines and going with the flowery "the human heart is the most powerful weapon" rally (nudge nudge, Terminator Salvation), the whole Matrix saga is essentially about not letting our fear of technology hinder our progress, which is an incredibly apt view of the 21st century.

The world today is even more technologically-driven than back in 1999 or 2003. People can't take a vacation without blogging about it and we have a geek in the Oval Office who I suspect would be Tweeting things like "Rahm has hole in pants lolol" on his Barackberry if it weren't for National Security reasons.