The Matrix Online Hands-On
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The real amazement comes, however, once you start looking at the art design of the world. Monolith's art department has been working hand-in-glove with the Wachowski Brothers since before the last films were released and their influence really shows. The more you travel through the different areas of the Matrix, the more wrong you realize everything is. The City, after all, was designed by machines as a best guess approximation of what constituted the "ordinary" human world. As a result, once you know that the City isn't really a place of bricks and mortar, but a graphic representation of streams of code, that the place begins to make sense.
Color, for example, is very significant. There is no blue in the Matrix. Check out the movies again and some of the screenshots for the game to realize what a profound challenge that represents for Monolith's production artists. They needed to create something that resembles a normal cityscape, circa 1999, while never using the color blue. The fact that they succeeded is a testament to their skill and also explains why everything in the game is shot through with a subtle green tinge. Red represents a crack in the Matrix's fabrication of reality. Prominent red objects, doors, chairs, or buildings will often be significant, though the players may not know just how or why until they attain more levels.
