A live-action
Sword Art Online TV series is on the way! Ever since the premiere of the anime in 2014, SAO, as it's affectionately called, has arguably been the most popular IP in the genre. The project is being backed by a serious Hollywood heavyweight as Skydance Media has secured the rights from Kadokawa, with plans to fast-track the project. Skydance has produced such feature films as
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol,
Star Trek Into Darkness and
Jack Reacher.
For those unfamiliar with Sword Art Online, the story is set in the year 2022 and Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (VRMMORPG) are all the rage. Just as the name implies, players enter the video game world through a virtual reality helmet that completely immerses player's senses into a digital representation of the game their playing. Howver, when a new game called Sword Art Online and its advanced VR helmet, the NerveGear are launched, 10,000 players step into the game's closed beta for the first time and discover that they're unable to log off. Complicating matters further is the discovery that if someone in the real world physically removes their NerveGear, they instantly die. Adding yet another layer of danger is the fact that if you die in the game (lose all your HP), you also die in real life. This is all part of a sadistic plot by the creator of SAO and the NerveGear, where the only way to escape the game is for someone to progress through all 100 dungeon levels and beat the final boss.
What was particularly interesting about the anime was the fact that it wasn't a quick adventure, players were trapped in the virtual world for quite some time leading many to question what was happening to their physical bodies in the real world. Some players broke down, unable to cope with their predicament and committed suicide by jumping off tall towers. Reki Kawahara's series achieved a delicate balance of realism while still retaining the charms and idiosyncrasies one would expect to find in anime.
Head over to our sister site, AnimeMojo.com to read the official Press Release and find out who's writing the pilot.
Check out a trailer for Sword Art Online below.