Top 10 Times Anime Predicted The Future

“Mobile Suit Gundam” (1979-80)

Hey Zeon! Leave Australia alone, they’ve got enough to deal with without you dropping space colonies on their shores! While mercifully the real-life outback didn’t suffer the same fate as its anime counterpart when the Principality of Zeon let a colony fall and essentially nuke the population, it did have to deal with some cosmic debris when the US’ space station Skylab de-orbited and ended up sprinkling its remains over the continent the exact same year that it was depicted in the anime. So, either space really hates Australia, or Tomino can see into the future…

“.hack” and “Sword Art Online” franchises (2002-)

It’s fair to say there’s certainly been a boom in the gaming sphere in recent years, especially with technology evolving at such a tremendous rate. If people aren’t playing a battlegrounds style game like COD warzone (totally predicted by gun gale online btw), they’re trying out a new virtual reality game that physically immerses them more than ever before. Oddly enough, these two astoundingly popular franchises seemed to have their finger on the pulse of these developments. There’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation going on with which predicted it first, .Hack or the original Sword art light novels, but we’re finally in the age of VR Headsets just as these two gaming titans had predicted.

“JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders” (2014-15)
Ok, so we’re breaking our own rule here and looking at a manga rather than an anime - but this one’s just too bizarre to ignore. Fans may remember the duo of Oingo and Boingo who, the younger of which had the ability to predict the future with his comic book stand. One of their first predictions depicts a man in a shirt with the numbers “9/11” written on it. We also see a creepy airplane grinning away in the background. The comic book then predicts that this man would be killed at exactly 10:30am… which is eerily close to the 10:28am attack on the world trade center. Did Araki predict the events of 9/11 in the creepiest of ways?

“Yu-Gi-Oh” (2000-04)
Sure, some of the oldest examples of the three-dimensional light fields we all associate with sci-fi predate this card-game anime by decades, but when it comes to augmented reality projections being incorporated into entertainment and artistic industries, Yugi and company were just slightly ahead of the curve. We may be a little way off from re-creating legitimate duel disks that let us summon holograms any time, any place, but we can still pop on a headset and summon all the Blue Eyes White Dragons we want!

“éX-Driver” (2000-01)
Have you heard of this series? Of course you haven’t. While it doesn’t necessarily have the golden oldie stamp of approval, it does have the distinction of being the first anime to impose the idea of self-driving cars. While the narrative depicts a future where autonomous vehicles are used by just about everyone, we’re still very much in the testing stages. The west aren’t likely to be getting any self-driving cars for many years now, but we are still very much on track for making them a glorified reality. Way to go eX-Driver, this might be your one claim to fame. Also Elon Musk is best waifu.

“Accel World” (2012)
While we are nowhere at the stage where we can move freely inside of a virtual world as we do in real life, that’s not to say incredible strides haven’t been taken, to the point now where the scene in which Arita plays random games in cyberspace as his little pig avatar looks like something you’d see while jaunting through VR Chat. Though, it’s slightly unfair at how they got someone as exotic as Princess Snow Black while all we have is Knuckles the Russian Echinda.

“Megazone 23” (1985)
This is it people, the anime that first introduced the concept of a beautiful woman crafted in virtual reality that both entertains the public as a superstar, while also serving as a love interest for our brooding protagonist. Granted, there are some key differences when compared to what we have. Instead of just one a single performer, now we have an entire industry dedicated to idols with augmented personas, which in turn has branched off to create the VTuber movement. And as far as lovers go…come on, your deleted browser history speaks for itself.

“Dennō Coil” (2007)
VR headsets are all the rage now, with every company under the sun trying to get a piece of that sweet virtual reality income. The same can be said for the anime scene from a narrative perspective, and the one to start it all was none other than this harmless show, where a bunch of kids use glasses to explore the various mysteries of their city, which by this point is half real, half internet. Whatever you might thing of the overall plot, the way it presents the AR’s software and the impact it has on the populace and businesses is scarily similar to what is happening on our end.

“Cowboy Bebop” (1998-99)
Now this is just eerie. We all remember that classic Bebop episode were Spike is seconds away from getting roasted by the Earth’s gravitational pull, only to be rescued by a pair of old associates via one hell of a risky rescue involving a space shuttle named the Columbia. Sure, it burns up on re-entry due to the heat-resistant tiles peeling off, but one crash-landing later and Spike walks away no worse for wear. Two years later – NASA’s own space shuttle, also named the Columbia, suffered a near identical incident involving the failings of its heat resistant tiles, leading to the whole thing exploding. Yikes.

“Akira” (1988)
Aside from having the accolades of one of anime’s greatest movies, serving as an inspiration for all dark and gritty sci-fi flicks, as well as just raising the bar for animation in general, Akira also has that rare honour of predicting the location of the Olympics a decade later. In one scene, a signboard reveals that there’s only a few months to go before the legendary sporting extravaganza takes place in Neo-Tokyo, and wouldn’t you know it, it was scheduled to happen in real life too. Given how the world completely turns to shit within the same time frame as our own, we’d say this was pretty accurate.