A special event last Saturday entitled Science ADV Live S;G 10th Anniversary announced that a Hollywood live-action series adaptation of popular visual-novel game Steins;Gate has been greenlit. Skydance Television (Altered Carbon, Jack Ryan, Grace & Frankie) was revealed to be producing the project. The announcement also stated that the live-action television series will be streaming worldwide “soon”.

If you are a Sword Art Online fan, perhaps Skydance Television sounds familiar to you: yes, it is the same production company that announced in 2016 that it was working on a live-action SAO series. Skydance has even named Lara Croft: Tomb Raider writers Patrick Massett and John Zinman as showrunners and writers for their adaptation of the popular isekai series. The last update on the live-action series was in 2018, when one of the writers Laeta Kalogridis said that streaming rights had been sold to Netflix.

Steins;Gate was first released on October 15, 2009 for the Xbox 360 in Japan. Since its release, the VN game has enjoyed both critical and commercial success. Because of its popularity, the 2009 game has seen a number of ports to different consoles across several years. The game has also been adapted into manga, which was serialized from 2009 to 2013. It also received an anime adaptation in 2011 by White Fox; Steins;Gate’s sequel game, Steins;Gate 0, also received an anime adaptation in 2018 by the same animation studio.

In Steins;Gate you play as main protagonist Rintaro Okabe, founder of the “Future Gadget Laboratory” and a self-proclaimed mad scientist. The story picks up after Rintaro discovers that he and his friends have accidentally developed a machine that can send text messages back in time. They are joined by Kurisu Makise, a neuroscience researcher, who develops their machine further to enable it to send memories back in time, effectively allowing them to use time travel. Science organization SERN learns about their time-travel machine and sends people to retrieve the machine but end up killing Rintaro’s childhood friend Mayuri. Devastated, Rintaro tries to re-do the past to prevent Mayuri’s death to no avail, until he is approached by Suzuha Amane. Suzuha, a girl from the future, tells him that the only way to undo Mayuri’s death is to undo the effects of all the messages he has sent through their time-travel machine.

Source: Anime News Network