What did Serial Experiments Lain do for its 25th anniversary?
For its 25th birthday, Lain did not get a remake. It got an alternate-reality game and an AI of itself, the most Lain anniversary imaginable.
The rights holder, NBCUniversal Entertainment Japan, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Lain’s 1998 broadcast in 2023 with two experiments rather than a product line. Both were built with the Tokyo company Anique, and both were supervised by the man who started everything, producer Yasuyuki Ueda.
THE TWO EXPERIMENTS
Announced June and September 2023Layer 3301: De-Cipher
An alternate-reality game built with digital-collectible studio Kasagi, announced in June 2023, with Ueda supervising and a comment from Yoshitoshi ABe. Players entered through purchasable digital collectibles called Protocol Keys, and the game set them to explore what the announcement called “Network Spirituality”, the series’ oldest theme, turned into the anniversary’s rules.
AI lain
Launched September 5, 2023: a chatbot Lain, built by Anique on OpenAI’s models and voiced through CoeFont, trained on the anime’s scripts and archived recordings of Kaori Shimizu, Lain’s original voice. Ueda supervised her personality; she is cold and terse at first, and does not show her face until she warms to you. Ten messages were free; unlimited conversation cost $20 a month.
Ueda’s verdict
Ueda’s comment on the AI is the anniversary’s most Lain document: he was “keenly aware of the technical challenges of AI,” he wrote, but “I enjoyed the process of AI Lain’s growth during the development, and I hope others can also enjoy this development or ‘experiment’ process itself.” The producer of a show about a girl becoming a network presence, treating a chatbot as another layer of the work.
THE FRAME AROUND IT
lainTTL: the open doorGuidelines since 2019
Behind both experiments sits NBCUniversal’s lainTTL framework: official guidelines under which individuals in Japan may create derivative Lain works, commercial and non-commercial, until July 6, 2028, the series’ thirtieth anniversary. Very few anime properties have ever been opened to their fans on paper like this.
Why it fits
A series about a self that exists wherever it is copied, distributed under a license that invites copying: the anniversary did not commemorate Lain. It performed it.