Oni matrix

What is the matrix?

The "Oni matrix" is a pattern of binary digits and kana/kanji. Likely influenced by The Matrix (which came out during Oni's marketing phase), Oni's 1999 trailer featured an animated background fairly similar to "Matrix code". From there the pattern went on to become a recurrent background element of promotional art, packaging and ingame splashscreens (main menu, etc), often in combination with circuitry blueprints.

A distinctive feature of Oni's "matrix" is the non-trivial meaning of the Japanese kana, which was deciphered by dedicated fans over the years. Digest results of that research are presented below (a detailed historical account is available HERE).

Visual appearance

Bungie West's template

A particularly clear view of the matrix is found in a template called japanese matrix.psd (Photoshop file) from Bungie West archives.

Ready for a full-resolution picture? (Relax, it's only 1024x576.)

There are 42 columns and 28 rows, i.e., twenty-four 7x7 blocks. (There is extra space between the columns, hence the image is a bit wider than a 3:2 aspect ratio.)

The four quadrants (blocks of 21x14 symbols) are actually identical, and look as follows (with added color for readability):

The japanese kana/kanji read from top to bottom, and form short phrases. (Therefore we assume binary digits to read from top to bottom as well.)

The right-to-left reading order of the columns is not applicable here, seeing as the image is meant as a vertical "streamer" (repeated indefinitely).

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The oni kanji (鬼, red background) is the most recurrent element in the matrix, with 11 instances per quadrant. It mostly appears on its own (surrounded by binary digits), although it is also seen prefixed to kako no aru onna 過去のある女 (yellow). It can be interpreted both as the Japanese word oni 鬼 (meaning "demon" or "ogre") and as its Chinese prototype guǐ 鬼 (meaning "ghost"). See HERE for more on this ambiguity.

N.B. In some columns, vertical wrapping produces a 鬼鬼 sequence, pronounced kiki (Japanese) or guǐguǐ (Chinese), and typically used as a given name or nickname. This seems irrelevant in Oni's context, and is likely unintentional.

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The seven Japanese/English phrases are as follows (see HERE for a recap of the translation effort):

• kurai i sho-rai 暗い将来 (green) – "a dark future" (the first of Oni's taglines in the 1999 trailer);

  N.B. one instance of kurai i sho-rai 暗い将来 is truncated (first kana missing); vertical wrapping puts it next to the end of kako no aru onna 過去のある女;

• ka-ko no a-ru onna 過去のある女 (yellow) - literally "a certain woman of the past", likely intended to mean "the past of a certain woman" or "a woman with a past", echoing Konoko's "uncertain past" (the second tagline);

  N.B. one instance of ka-ko no a-ru onna 過去のある女 is truncated (second half missing), another is prefixed with oni 鬼;

• shin-rai ni atai-su-ru hito i-na-i 信頼に値する人いない (magenta) - literally "[there is] no one worthy of trust", likely intended to mean "no one left to trust" (the third tagline);
• fu-ru ko-n-ta-ku-to a-ku-shi-yo-n ㇷルコンタクトァクシヨン (cyan) - a katakana transcription of "full contact action" (one of Oni's Unique Selling Points);
• i-i kei-kan / waru-i kei-kan 良い警官 / 悪い警官 (lime) - "good cop" / "bad cop" (likely a reference to the early story);

  N.B. as the streamer wraps around, you actually get a contiguous 悪い警官良い警官, i.e., "bad cop good cop" instead of "good cop" / "bad cop";

• bu-ra-mu / ko-ru-ta-na ブラム / コルタナ (orange) - "Blam" / "Cortana" (two Bungie references: Cortana from the upcoming Halo, and "Blam" as both the codename for Halo and a general Bungie meme of Myth fame)
• ko-ru-ta-na wa kuru ru yo コルタナは来るよ (silver) - "Cortana is coming" (another reference to the upcoming Halo);

  N.B. the ru る kana is superfluous here, i.e., it should be just wa kuru yo は来よ, not wa kuru ru yo は来るよ.

(The seven phrases would become nine if one were to separate "Blam" and "Cortana", as well as "good cop" and "bad cop" – and, if you count 鬼 as a phrase, that makes ten.)

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The five "lone kana" (ka カ, se セ, nu ヌ, sa サ, and re レ; blue outline) are likely filler.

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The binary digits do not seem to carry any meaning, either. If "Big Endian" order is assumed for the digits, then the following numbers occur:

• 2892 (0101101001100), 37 (100101), 22 (010110), 17 (10001), 10 (01010),
• 9 (1001), 5 (0101), 4 (0100), 3 (011, 11), 2 (10), 1 (01, 1), and 0 (00, 0).

If "Little Endian" is allowed, then six additional readings/interpretations emerge:

• 3132 (0011001011010), 41 (101001), 26 (011010), 10 (1010), 2 (0010), and 6 (110).

Alas, none of those numbers are particularly Oni-relevant, and they are not too "Bungie", either.

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Last but not least: note the uneven width of the columns, the slight variations in the vertical alignment (not a perfect grid), and how the use of a larger font size for some of the binary digits (red outline) causes rather sloppy-looking truncated "1"s at the bottom of the ka/se and nu/sa/re columns.

Somewhat surprisingly, all the imperfections of the template are faithfully reproduced at higher resolutions. We are in fact seeing those truncated "1"s (and the truncated Japanese phrases) in every instance of the matrix (trailer, promotional art, ingame splashscreens, etc) – although some exceptions may exist.

Scrolling properties

Trailer opening

The 1999 trailer's screen proportions exactly match those of the japanese matrix.psd template. Also, during the titles we see exactly 28 symbols down and 42 across. Thus, although the trailer's low resolution makes it hard to tell for sure, it is safe to assume that the template was made specifically for the trailer, and that the trailer's two sheets of "matrix data" sliding up and down are simple copies of japanese matrix.psd. The only thing that needs to be determined is the sliding speed, initial offset timing, and shape of the holes in the frontmost matrix sheet (the one that slides upwards).

It takes about 5 seconds for the columns (28 symbols) to cover the height of the screen. The holes in the upwards-moving foreground columns, as well as the initial offsets of the columns at the start of each title sequence, are not documented at this point.

Static occurrences

Hardly an exhaustive list, this is merely meant as a representative collection of matrix sightings, more or less high quality, for anyone wishing to ascertain the pattern described above.

Most often the matrix is sampled on one layer, but sometimes two layers are present, with different scales.

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• Windows (RU) box art - front.jpg
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• Chapter 4 .MISSION COMPLETE (HD).jpg
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Some packaging art features "binary rain" instead of a mix of binary and kana/kanji. The binary sequences (filler most likely) have not been studied.

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• Mac (EU) box art - front.jpg
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Notable not-quite-lookalikes

The Matrix (1999)

The Matrix's code used a custom typeface consisting of decimal digits, Latin capital letters and half-width kana - all of them mirrored horizontally. The characters do not actually slide downwards across the screen, instead they are located on a static grid and refreshed in downwards-scrolling sequences.

In the Oni 1999 trailer, the columns are actually sliding up and down, rather than revealed through in-place refreshing. This is a major difference between the animated Oni matrix and Matrix code. The other differences are:

• the glyphs themselves (in Oni they are not mirrored, the kana are full-width, and the digits are binary rather than decimal);
• Oni's lesser randomness (a small number of actually meaningful phrases and a uniform sliding motion, as opposed to the utterly unintelligible and unpredictable Matrix code).

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Seeing as The Matrix was influenced by anime and cyberpunk, a possible influence for The Matrix's digital rain (at least for its dense/intense variations) is the effect that was used in Ghost In The Shell (1995) for the opening titles (a.k.a. "Making Of Cyborg"). In this case we are looking at a monochrome screen (hexagonal halftone) densely packed with lines of fixed-width characters (with slight height variations from one line to another). There are no letters or kana, and the digits are decimal rather than binary. Instead of scrolling, the digits are flickering in rapid succession, seemingly at random (patterns can be identified only by looking at snapshots). The opening titles' lines are gradually "extracted" from this rapid succession of digits, not unlike a split flap display.

Since Oni's 1999 trailer specifically uses the sliding matrix columns as a background for titles (with titles seemingly emerging from the flowing data), it is possible that the GITS opening had a direct influence on the trailer as well.

Meteo (1990)

Meteo is an old Hungarian thriller. It is much more marginally known that The Matrix or GITS, but it has an interesting scene with a perplexed coder staring at pages of more or less cryptic data. Some of the code (HERE) uses densely packed characters from the extende ASCII table, flickering at random, and visually similar to Matrix code.