Meta Runner

Meta Runner is an Australian independent-animated web series created by Kevin and Luke Lerdwichagul and produced by Glitch Productions, with funding support from Screen Australia, Crunchyroll, AMD, and Epic Games. The series follows characters originally created for the brothers' Super Mario parody web series SMG4. It premiered on YouTube on 25 July 2019, with season 2 premiering on the channel GLITCH on 16 October 2020. The third and final season premiered on 22 July 2022.

The series takes place in a futuristic society where entertainment and lifestyle are based around video games and esports. The best of the best gamers in this society replace one of their arms with a cybernetic arm in order to optimize their gameplay performance, and are known as "Meta Runners". The series focuses on an amnesiac girl named Tari, who discovers that she has the ability to warp inside video games, and comes across and helps an undercover group called MD-5 in their mission to expose the corrupt company TAS Corp.

A pilot for a spin-off show titled Ultra Jump Mania, based on the fictional video game of the same name in the show, was released on 4 September 2020, but it was not picked up for a full season.

In Silica City, all media and entertainment are mostly based around video games, not just serving as entertainment, but also jobs in live streaming and lifestyle. Among members of society are Meta Runners, individuals who have replaced their limbs with cybernetic arms that allow them to boost their gaming performance.

The series tells the story of Tari, a Meta Runner who was the subject of an experiment called Project Blue, led by Dr. Sheridan, a TAS Corp scientist. After waking up in a safehouse in the alleys of Silica City, Tari finds herself in the city with amnesia. The last thing Tari can remember is a sudden accident causing an explosion in the lab that supposedly kills Sheridan and his test subject, Lucinia Porter, a Meta Runner from TAS Corp.

As revealed in a video titled "The Making of Tari" uploaded by Luke and Kevin Lerdwichagul on 14 February 2019 on their YouTube channel, the basis for the Meta Runner protagonist Tari, originally created for their Super Mario parody web series SMG4 as an original character, originated when Kevin and Luke asked their younger sister, Tish, who was drawing in her sketchbook, if she had any ideas for a new character to add to their channel's titular machinima series; she drew a "gamer girl" character who would become Tari. The first early design of Tari was for her to be a robot instead of a cyborg, an antenna on top of her head, headphones, a simple jacket with a love heart stitched onto it and a d-pad for her right eye.

Eventually, Tari was redesigned as a human cyborg with a white vest with the Meta Runner emblem, which was based on the blue jay's wing. She was also given a blue hoodie with blue jay wing patterns on each shoulder starting from "Sequence Break" (episode 4).

Meta Runner was first teased at the end of the SMG4 episode, "War of the Fat Italians 2018", depicting the character Theo and the date 5 December 2018. The months following had similar teasers of different Meta Runner arms before the official trailer for Meta Runner was uploaded on 5 December 2018.