The Show

ReBoot

Reboot was a Canadian animated show that aired 4 seasons between 1994 and 2001. It was created by Mainframe Studios, and was the first fully-CGI animated show. It revolved around the adventures of characters living inside a computer system, as they fought to keep their system safe from viruses and games. 

Although primarily targeted at children, the show contained complex world-building, interesting characters, and intricate and ongoing plots, which combined with real-world cultural references, drew in many older youths and even young adults. Later seasons of the show built upon this success and re-targeted the show more towards the older crowd.

Despite an enthusiastic fanbase, the show struggled to find reliable financing, with the idea of a cartoon for older youths and young adults being an uncommon idea at the time. As such, a planned 5th season was never produced. 

This is the show upon which Reboot: The RPG is based.

ReBoot: The Guardian Code

Many revivals of the show were attempted, but finances never materialized.

Finally in 2014 a new concept was revealed that would combine CG animation with live action segments. This new show would focus on 4 new characters, teenagers in the real-world who would travel into cyberspace. The main characters of the original show were confirmed to appear, but only in a limited capacity.

The show ended up producing 20 episodes divided in 2 seasons, both aired in 2018 in Netflix (in most markets). The show largely failed to find an audience, with fans of the original rejecting it for sidelining the original characters, world, and concept, while it failed to draw in new viewers. The show also bore a striking similarity to the French animated series: Code Lyoko, which predates The Guardian Code by over a decade, resulting in many criticizing the new show for simply being a knockoff.

Reboot: The RPG does not adhere to the canon of Reboot: The Guardian Code.

Recent Revival

In 2023 a doccumentary film team announced they were working on a retrospective series, wanting to honour the original series for it's 30th anniversary in 2024. They were granted access to the Mainframe Studios video archives to search for the master tapes of ReBoot, thought to still exist, but having long-since been lost track of.

The search was a success, finding a set of broadcast masters, in near-HD quality, although in a long-dead commercial video cassette format. This kicked off a months long search for a working machine capable of playing back and outputting the cassettes, but with a massive communiy push and financial backing from LinusTechTips, the team was successful, and the native-near-HD video from the tapes has been recovered, and the doccumentary series is set to launch this fall.

Additionally, Mainframe Studios released the recovered near-HD first episode of the series on YouTube on the 30th Anniversary! 

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