I've done it, I've hit the age where like my parents before me and their parents before them I have come to believe that the best time for entertainment was when I was young.
We all sometimes feel this way, not due to the quality of the content being exclusively better but more due to my attention at the time of release being wired to work with the format. It extends beyond just media, I've come to miss single purpose devices like iPods and things like digital streaming have hit a tipping point for me where having access to everything has left me with a desire for nothing. I'm buying DVD's again.
There are some benefits to looking back; physical media is often cheap since very few people want it anymore and content I skipped over in my youth is suddenly hitting in a way it didn't back then because it's giving that dose of nostalgic style and format I was programmed to gel with. No longer is it a time to be picky, the media made in the period and style I'm most familiar with is over and I have a backlog of premium content to get through for my "they don't make em like they used to" fix.
Outside of just TV, music and tech; video game popularity was reaching an all time high as news segments gave coverage to midnight releases of popular titles. Then came the always there but now moving into a mainstream space; PC gaming. While most of us stuck to consoles growing up, the PC gaming space exploded into wider popularity in the west as MMORPG's like World of Warcraft began to draw the attention of not just the youth but adults too. A lot of fear mongering surrounded the genre in the press as people began to dedicate maybe a little too much of their time and energy to MMO's, impacting their ability to engage reality in a normal way.
Alongside all of this was the opening of a door to international content brought about by the internet. Dedicated programming blocks like Cartoon Network's Toonami were built upon importing Japanese anime to keep costs down and broadcasting them in quieter time slots. This would cause small communities of viewers to become more interested in anime, seek it out online and share that content among their peers via online forums.
I'm not here to try and sell you on things being better back then, those times are over and new experiences I'm not privy to as an adult are happening right now among the next generation of youth who will eventually speak the same way about their time as teens with things like TikTok, K-Pop and Roblox. The time I'm speaking about was just something I consider "better" because that was when I had the most time to give to entertainment, it left a mark.
So lets get into .hack, a franchise that thrived off of all the things previously mentioned by slotting it all together. You would rarely stumble into .hack, especially where I'm from in the UK. It would mostly come as a recommendation when you say to someone "hey, I'm enjoying these MMO's and anime, I wish there was a piece of media that covered both" and your nerdiest friend who hung out on the most rogue websites you've ever seen might say "I have just the thing."
.hack//Sign was the first part in an extensive media project that told a singular story across anime, movies, video games, novels, and Manga. While the .Hack project worked towards a united franchise narrative, each individual entry focused on their own core characters and stories with crossover moments mostly being a cameo here or there. With such a large scope for the franchise and other parts of .hack to finance, projects like .Hack//Sign had a noticeably smaller budget to work with than other popular anime of the time, relying primarily on conversation scenes to carry a majority of the show's runtime.
With a need for conversation to carry itself, .Hack//Sign ended up getting quite introspective about what MMORPG's meant for the people playing them in the early 2000's. While broadcast news segments discussed the damage MMORPG's did to a small percentage of people who had built obsessive desires around them, they failed to recognise that there were thousands more who benefited from the emerging genre.
It's only now that time has passed that we are beginning to recognise this other side to digital spaces. The movies of Mamoru Hosoda have been steadily growing in popularity over the last two decades and have often focused on the benefits of connection the internet has brought to our modern world. The 2024 documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin further celebrated freedoms afforded others in digital spaces as they covered the story of a man with muscular dystrophy who managed to maintain a second life online before passing.
Though it has taken a while for the world to understand what digital spaces can do for some, this small anime with a minimal budget released in the middle of it all and spoke the truth. A little messy on the narrative side, less visually interesting than shows with real budgets for animation, and catering to an already small community of both anime fans and MMO players, .Hack//Sign didn't exactly open any doors but it did speak to a few that could relate.
The most interesting part of the show is that the anime stayed primarily in the game world and let these characters be who they presented themselves as. It's not until the show is working towards the final that we begin to get a clear image of who is on the other side of the characters we've been following and that informs their behaviours in the digital space. The real world aspect only serves as backstory and allows them to be who they truly are in the game space.
I would love to one day look at each episode of the series and discuss the .Hack franchise as a whole so hopefully this can stand as an introductory post towards that goal but for now I hope this was an interesting acknowledgement of a title that's worth remembering for trying something new.
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