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Authorized Serial Experiments Lain Spinoff Game Launches on April 30

Team MJM will launch //signal. — an "occultic role-playing game" that is an officially authorized spinoff from the Serial Experiments Lain anime — on the Steam and itch.io services on April 30. The Windows and macOS game will cost 1,000 yen (about US$7) for the digital version, or 1,700 yen (about US$11) for the limited-edition CD-ROM release.

This new game is authorized under guidelines that NBCUniversal Entertainment published for residents of Japan to make derivative works of the anime from 2019 and 2028. The game's staff emphasized this by posting a letter that is essentially a positive blurb from the anime's scriptwriter Chiaki J. Konaka.

The game has the player interacting with characters from the anime, assembling emails and event logs from the past, and piecing together broken bonds again. Through this, the player can uncover "a new facet" of the character Lain Iwakura — and by extension, Serial Experiments Lain itself.

The 13-episode anime aired in Japan from July to September 1998. Ryūtarō Nakamura directed the anime, Chiaki J. Konaka wrote the scripts, and Yoshitoshi ABe designed the characters.

The anime's staff had initially planned the project as a game that eventually became a PlayStation software title from PIONEER LDC in November 1998. Digital collectible anime studio Kasagi and Tokyo-based company Anique announced an alternate reality game (ARG) based on Serial Experiments Lain, Layer 3301: De-Cipher, in June 2023. However, that game's staff announced its cancelation four months later.

Funimation announced in 2010 that it licensed the anime previously held by Geneon, and it has since released the series on home video in 2012 and 2014.

Crunchyroll began streaming the series in 2017. The company describes the series:

Acclaimed artist Yoshitoshi ABe (Haibane Renmei, Texhnolyze) brings to life the existential classic that paved the way for blockbuster films such as The Matrix. Follow along as fourteen year old Lain—driven by the abrupt suicide of a classmate—logs on to the Wired and promptly looses herself in a twisted mass of hallucinations, memories, and interconnected-psyches.

Crunchyroll removed the series in 2018.

Source: Famitsu via Hachima Kikō, press release