The Matrix fan film: The World’s Oldest Ciel celebrates its 20th birthday

Fanimatrix is ​​almost as old as BitTorrent

File sharing via BitTorrent peaked about ten years ago, but the protocol of the same name is much older and was developed and published shortly after the turn of the millennium. The Pirate Bay was launched in 2003 and in the following years torrents reached the general public.

how torrentfreak She stated that the new technology made it easier for users to share particularly large files, which were quickly used for films and series. However, most torrent files from the early days are no longer active today, with one exception.

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Because the oldest torrent still active today is as old as The Pirate Bay and is called The Fanimatrix (embedded in the video above). It was created in September 2003 and is currently celebrating its twentieth birthday. It’s a film made by some friends from New Zealand that cost them a whopping $800, with about half of that budget going to a leather jacket.

The approximately 16-minute long fan film tells its own story from the universe of The Matrix, but finding a distribution channel for it at the time was difficult or even impossible. YouTube was only founded in 2005, and there were no similar services at that time. However, an IT expert among friends discovered the BitTorrent protocol and then created The Fanimatrix torrent file associated with it.

This is still running today, with over 100 seeds, making the fanfic – by far – the oldest torrent still active. The participants of The Fanimatrix originally wanted to celebrate their twentieth birthday, but nothing happened.

By the way, The Fanimatrix should not be confused with the ASCII version of The Matrix, because it was also considered the oldest active torrent in the world for a long time – but the live-action torrent is a few weeks older than “The Matrix ASCII”.

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