Serial Experiments Lain has a legacy of being a commentary on the disconnection of an online world and broader social isolation, striking for its unnerving tone and a timeless retro-futuristic cybernetic view of the online world. Even now, there’s little anime that can compare to its unusual blend of philosophy and science fiction, the dissociative, split-personality existence of Lain herself and the spiraling world and people around her the only things grounding the show’s existentialist questions around the meaning of life in the modern online and offline world.
This was a series that explored the idea of what it means to exist both online and in the real world, and the way each of these worlds influence our personalities, how we interact, and how we view the world around us. It’s an idea that’s only become more pressing with age as smartphones and COVID and the encroachment of the algorithm dictate our modern lives no matter how we try to disconnect. It’s a major factor in its continued legacy, and prophetically was something the series was dedicated to exploring even upon its release.
While often forgotten nowadays, Serial Experiments Lain was far more than an anime: it was a manga, it was a music project, it had a PlayStation game that dove into the in-universe Wired (equivalent to our internet), a game so rare that used copies regularly fetch far in excess of ¥100,000 today. Thematically, the mere existence of this media had a purpose beyond the ways they expanded the core ideas of the series through their stories. As the interconnected world of the Wired consumes Lain, she becomes ever-present. Her actual story is not important, merely the fact that she is an idea that audiences themselves can embrace and piece together her story from rumors and hearsay.
Lain is an urban myth. The fact the legacy of the series has only grown, images of its opening theme and the character of Lain herself thrown around online communities increasingly disconnected from its source material is ironically fitting. Today, Lain has superseded her source material, becoming the pseudo-god of the online world she was fated to be in the series, a warning far preceding her true story. In 2025, she exists as a legend from which her thematic idea is more important than her truth.
Who is Lain? Does that matter? She is just like us. Once you’re too far interconnected with the digital, it’s impossible to find your truth disconnected from the influence of the online world. We are all merely an idea, reconstructed for content.
In 2019, NBC Universal released an open-source licensing agreement for the Serial Experiments Lain series. What this did was codify unofficial policy that allowed for fans to create derivative works based on the IP and release them to the public, allowing anyone to create anything from music to CD to new stories to games provided they didn’t use original art and assets from the anime or other official media. It could take the idea and characters, but you have to draw and write the work yourself. This wasn’t free reign to put key art of the anime on a t-shirt for profit.
It was an unprecedented situation, but one very much in-line with the ideas of the original story. Lain is an idea of a sense of self in the online space that had long since transcended the series she was a part of. Now she was truly free to become anything that fans could want her to be. It was Time to Live, as the project put it.
The intervening years have seen a number of fan projects take advantage of this licensing agreement, but the latest such project has garnered more attention than most. //signal., by Team_MJM, is a spiritual successor-of-sorts to the original PlayStation title, an all-new occult-like RPG that uses the virtual desktop as a window into the online world and mental psychology of Lain Ishikawa herself.
To set expectations, this is a low-budget doujin project being released commercially through the rights offered by NBC Universal’s open-license policy. As such, this is not a canon new entry into the series, though it has received blessing from series writer Chiaki Konaka. The game takes place in an unspecified new future following the series that expands on the disconnection caused by the Wired by imagining a society made up of entirely-offline people and those consumed by the Wired. The latter have abandoned the real world to be dictated and driven by technology.
By talking and interacting with an AI that contains the memories of those who once interacted with Lain, she wonders if there is a way to reconnect the world and take us on a journey away from the isolation that drives the current status quo.
While conceptually similar to the anime and the PS1 game, which took place through a simulated network of video logs and online files, this game supplants the ideas posed by the original series of the problems with an over-reliance on technology into the modern day. Not even the original anime considered the reliance on technology present today in its psychological explorations, and this new story takes us to the extremes of our modern-day reality.
Whereas the original was a warning of the possibility of our disconnection via the internal, this has that disconnection as a built-in reality of life. Rather than exploring what could happen if we’re disconnected, this is a game wondering if we can ever reconnect and leave this reliance behind.
Set for release next month, a pre-release demo gives some insight as to what to expect from this ambitious idea. When starting the game you’re greeted with a somewhat-crude recreation of a Windows XP-esque PC desktop. Checking your emails, you see a message from an unknown sender with an ominous message: God has disappeared. From here, you dive into new files and interact with robotic recreations of Lain’s old classmates and others, occasionally participating in minigames like a dungeon crawler, recording your journey in a PC diary and rearranging these files in an attempt to find a way to reconnect with what has been lost.
The original Serial Experiments Lain anime has survived the test of time not just because of how prescient its themes have become with each passing year, but because its ideas and characters have transcended the series itself to become symbols for this disconnect with meanings of their own. The open-license project was designed to allow this new meta recontextualization of these characters to gain new life without being burdened, extending the life of the series by bringing it up to date with the modern day.
While we’ll have to wait for the final release to see if //signal. reaches these lofty expectations, its mere existence is an example of the stated goals of the open license project in action. Serial Experiments Lain remains a series about our present day, present time because the questions it posed about our existence never went away, merely evolved. The open license project has meant that, in lieu of anything from the official creators filling this voids, fans can legally plug the gaps. Whatever happens when it comes to the final game upon its release, the project which facilitates its existence is somethings where other older series could follow in Lain’s footsteps.
