I’ve always been fascinated by the .hack games, one of the first truly ambitious transmedia projects that involved video games, and yet I’ve never gotten around to finishing the original series. I decided it was high time I corrected that.
For the unfamiliar, .hack (pronounced “dothack”) is a Japanese franchise that encompasses video games, animation, manga and light novels. It began in 2002 with two distinct pieces of media: the video game .hack//INFECTION, which is what we’ll be talking about today, and .hack//SIGN, an anime series that, at the time of writing, I haven’t yet seen.
The project involved something of an all-star cast of Japanese talent, including anime director Kouichi Mashimo from studio Bee Train, Ghost in the Shell writer Kazunori Itou, and Gainax co-founder and Neon Genesis Evangelion character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto. Definitely quite the pedigree, then — so let’s take a closer look at the first interactive episode in this saga after the jump.
