The Unreal Engine 5 Matrix demo is now on PC, kind of

Back before The Matrix: Resurrections hit HBO, Epic released an Unreal Engine 5 tech demo called The Matrix Awakens. It looked really cool: a big, sometimes photorealistic city to drive around and make a mess of as Keanu Reeves and friends. Weirdly, it only released on PS5 and Xbox, but today we can finally drive one of the city's 38,146 driveable cars on PC—with a couple catches.

This version is called “City Sample,” which kind of sounds like a generic training program that Matrix characters would actually use, and that's somewhat close to what it is (minus the nerve implants). 

City Sample is an Unreal Engine 5 sample project which demonstrates how the engine's “new and improved systems” were used to build The Matrix Awakens, says Epic. It's a “complete city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters,” just like what was released on consoles, but without Neo, Trinity, or any of the other Matrix stuff—it's just a generic demo project.

Because it's a sample project, you need to download the Unreal Engine 5 development kit on the Epic Games Store to play with City Sample. If you have UE5 installed, you can find City Sample on the Unreal Engine marketplace, both in full or separated into its component parts. 

You could always add the Matrix stuff back in if you really wanted. You'd just have to become an expert Unreal Engine developer and steal the likenesses of a few actors, which can't be too hard.

Maybe someone will actually do that. At a minimum, surely someone will compile City Sample and release a Windows executable for those who don't feel like loading it up in UE5 themselves; I'll look out for that. 

The sample project is one of a few additions announced on Unreal Engine 5's big day: It finally escaped its “preview” version cocoon and entered full release this morning.