Welt am Draht also directly inspired the Matrix also-ran The Thirteenth Floor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirteenth_Floor). The Thirteenth Floor is not better than The Matrix as a cross-media series with a lot to say in later chapters, but I still think The Thirteenth Floor is a better whole movie than the first film called The Matrix. (Though I'm also in a weird minority that I think Matrix 2/3/4 are all individually better than the first film.)
Read the book. It has a very twisted bend on the movie. I saw the 13th floor on opening day... the theatre was empty and the movie was fantastic. D'Onforo played both roles brilliantly.
Also Colossus was filmed at Berkeley hall of science where I learned to program computers.
I didn't see eXistenZ until like a decade late, but that one also certainly has a twisted bend on the genre (for also being a contemporary of both 13th Floor and The Matrix).
I still don't understand how Roland Emmerich as "super Producer" after Stargate and Independence Day somehow managed to fail to get people into theater seats for 13th Floor. Someone at Sony screwed up that marketing. I don't even remember it playing in theaters, I found out about it on word of mouth in video rentals.
> I still don't understand how Roland Emmerich [...] somehow managed to fail to get people into theater seats for 13th Floor.
There were a lot of "are you living in a simulation?" film and television episodes that came out in 1998-2000. The Matrix was obviously the most successful, but Dark City (over a year earlier) had a similar theme. The X-Files episode "Field Trip" aired a few weeks after eXistenZ was in theatres, but a few weeks before The Thirteenth Floor was released. Etc.
I'm a fan of the genre, and I like all of the examples I've seen from that period (eXistenZ in particular), but I remember feeling at the time like it was just too much similar material in too short a period of time. I doubt Sony could have done anything to significantly change the box office numbers other than releasing it well before The Matrix.
It's still fascinating how much Dark City spent on sets, how poorly it did in the box office, and how quickly WB let The Matrix team ransack the sets. One of the factors in The Matrix's huge success at the time was that it was relatively cheap because of that leg up. It's one of the biggest visual differences between the first film and the sequels: the first film started from and benefited from Dark City's unique set design. (It's another thing I think makes the sequels better as movies because there was less aesthetic clash when the teams had full control of the sets and weren't just reusing/abusing great sets from a different team with an entirely different aesthetic design.)
I still have the game in the original box on my shelf - could not part with it when I gave away my DOS gaming collection - it was one of the games that made me think a lot as a teenager.
