5 Times Anime Accidentally Predicted the Future (& 5 Times It Was Completely Off the Mark)

We love anime set in the future because of the uncertainty and possible speculations. However, as time passes, the future becomes the past — and predictions don't always match the reality. That said, let's take a look at some that did (at least sort of) and some that absolutely missed!

.hack series predicted virtual reality gaming

.hack was a series of video games, light novels and anime that all focused on one thing: a game setting. Yes, it is essentially virtual reality gaming as we have it now — although arguably, ours isn't as advanced yet.

The most popular part of the franchise is .hack//Sign — which later inspired Sword Art Online. In SAO, we got super-advanced NerveGear reality gaming in 2022… which we still don't have. Somewhat of a bummer, honestly.

Evangelion was set in a post-apocalyptic 2015

In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the devastating Second Impact melted the ice caps and shifted the Earth's poles in 2000. This prompted the extinction of about half of the world's human population and completely changed the political landscape. In 2015, humans are fighting the unknown threat known as “Angels” — and the future is looking grim.

Thankfully, there were no experiments in Antarctica in 2000 that could have created such a future. Evangelion might be an iconic anime, but we're glad it's just fiction.

Serial Experiments Lain guessed how the internet would affect people

Serial Experiments Lain is a very weird series that is full of cryptic symbolism. It was also scarily realistic in its portrayal of how some people will decide to abandon their real lives for the sake of living online.

Despite the obviously sci-fi setup and story, as well as the timeline being off, Lain actually got extremely close to portraying our current society's obsession with the internet. It's somewhat depressing, but also fascinating.

Macross series thought we would have achieved space travel by now

In the original Macross series, an alien spaceship crashed into Earth in 1999. Its space travel technology was reverse-engineered, and just 10 years later, humanity united and started colonizing space.

Of course, none of that ever happened. It's dubious that we could even reverse-engineer space travel technology now — our scientific progress is, sadly, just not there yet.

eX-Driver is basically about Tesla cars going haywire

eX-Driver is a little-known anime set in the distant future — when cars are driven by artificial intelligence. That said, AI isn't flawless and at some point, starts to run amok: that's where the protagonists, called eX-Drivers, come to stop it with their old-fashioned human-driven cars.

Self-driving cars are basically already a thing — turns out, this future wasn't so distant, after all. The technology isn't there just yet, but it's progressing steadily — let's hope we'll still have people who can save us from the AI car apocalypse if it happens.

Astro Boy's predictions of the future are akin to those of early 20th century sci-fi

Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atom) is the first ever TV anime series — and it's set in the far future of 2013. To be fair, it was 50 years away from the air date of 1963, and in the manga, the setting was even earlier in time, with the year being 2003 instead.

As for the predictions… well, they are just funny.

Humans coexisting with robots, Mars expeditions and moon diamonds — the series feels like something straight out of early science fiction days now.

In a way, that only makes it better.

Robotics;Notes accidentally? got an astronomical event right

Robotics;Notes is set in the same universe as Steins;Gate — and references it as well as other visual novels/anime from the Science Adventure series, like ChäoS;HEAd. While Robotics;Notes is mostly a science fiction story, there are some things it gets right, and we aren't sure it's accidental.

Of course, AI technology isn't as advanced as it is shown in the series. We do have augmented reality, however (although we already had it when the visual novel came out).

The curious part is — the series predicts a huge solar storm to happen in December 2019. That never happened, but in that exact month, a new solar cycle started. Coincidence? Probably not, as the calculations were already out there in 2012, but it's still interesting.

In Fist of the North Star, the world has ended before the year 2000

The critically acclaimed manga and anime series Fist of the North Star (Hokuto no Ken) is set in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of… the late 20th century.

This insane setting seems to make no sense until you realize that the manga started running in 1983 — and, arguably, wasn't trying to predict anything, just using the year “199X” as a generic “near future” date.

Akira predicted the Tokyo 2020 Olympics

This is perhaps the wildest accidental prediction in all of anime. Back in the 80s, it was hard to imagine which country would host the Olympic games set that far in the future. Akira, somehow, predicts not just the games being held in Tokyo, but even the year (even though due to a pandemic, the games actually happened in 2021).

However, the world is not some kind of post-war cyberpunk dystopia we see in Akira. The actual progress of society predicted in Akira never happened — and thankfully so.

Ghost in the Shell made a lot of predictions

On the one hand, Ghost in the Shell (Koukaku Kidoutai) is set in the year 2029, where the line between humans and machines is thinner than ever. The world went through two more World Wars, and the advance of transhumanism has changed humanity forever.

Of course, none of this happened or will happen in the near future. However, Ghost in the Shell actually got one thing right — the advancement of cybercrime and its effects on society can't be overlooked.