Cyber Green

You can tell it's old tech because of the low resolution.

Green lines

Green green lines

It's a Strong Bad Email again!

— Strong Bad, Strong Bad Email #159 "retirement"

The screen you're using to look at this page right now is most likely capable of showing over 16 million different colors, but far in the past, the first computers were only capable of showing two colors, one of them black. The other color varies depending on the model and the kind of phosphor used in the monitor. However, there's one clear winner on what color defines old computers, a color still synonymous with older tech and robots and Cyberspace and all that jazz to this day, even when portraying the far future. Bright green.^note Well, either that or amber, but that's not as common as bright green. This was because that was the phosphor color used by the IBM 5151 monitor, supplied as standard with the original IBM Personal Computer in 1981, numerous CP/M business computers from the early to mid-1980s (such as the Amstrad PCW), and on many video display terminals from that general era. (White phosphors were sometimes also offered, but tended to be less popular with customers because they were harsher on the eyes.)

Even though we're far past the era of monochrome computers, usage of bright green (often joined by black) to represent computers isn't quite forgotten yet, thanks to this trope being used in works such as The Matrix. (Another attribute of the IBM 5151 monitor and other "slow decay" computer monitors was the afterimage left behind when a pixel or character stopped being drawn on the screen — it could take close to two seconds for the image to completely Fade Out. This was also used in The Matrix.)

Not to be confused with SYBR Green, a staining dye used in genetics research.

For a similar-but-different use of shades of green to represent a more specific form of old technology, see Green Boy Color.

A Super-Trope to Matrix Raining Code.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The opening sequence of Ghost in the Shell (1995) portraying the creation of a cyborg is tinted green, with green computer screens, green computer simulations, and green numbers repeatedly filling the screen before the numbers turn into the opening credits. This is what directly inspired The Matrix.

Asian Animation

• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf: One of the evil aliens in The Intriguing Alien Guests is named Digital Virus, can control electric appliances, and is a bright green color.

Films — Animated

• The Brave Little Toaster to the Rescue: Wittgenstein's computer virus is portrayed as green gremlin-like beings made from pure electricity, running about his circuits and destroying his vacuum tubes in a green explosion.
• Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase: While each level of the game is rendered with colorful and realistic graphics, the beginning of each level is formed with bright green Tron Lines. This is reflected on the cover, which shows Scooby and Shaggy running from the virus under a bright green sky. Additionally, the hyper energy laser that is capable of digitizing and de-digitizing objects, people or viruses fires a bright green ray.

Films — Live-Action

• Captain America: The Winter Soldier: Arnim Zola's digitized form is displayed on monochrome green monitors, due to him digitizing his mind sometime in the 1970s, when full-color monitors weren't widely used yet, or even existing yet, depending on the year.
• The The Matrix series is one of the reasons this trope is known today, from the iconic raining code of the first film's opening to how scenes set inside the computerized world of the titular Matrix are tinted green.
• RoboCop (1987): All the computer monitors are green and monochromatic. Even RoboCop's own Heads-Up Display uses exclusively shades of green on the overlays.
• TRON: The film mostly averts this, with the iconic Tron Lines instead being either light blue or vivid orange depending on each program's allegiance, but the opening and closing credits are written in an angular, bright green font meant to resemble command lines.

Literature

• The cover art for the Rivers of London novel False Value, while otherwise conforming to the established series style, is done in bright green linework on a black background. The plot of the novel revolves around sinister goings-on at a computer technology company.

Live-Action TV

• Bill Nye the Science Guy: During the "Science rules!" part of the theme song, the visuals become tinted green, before zooming out to reveal this was on a computer.
• Community: In the episode "Aerodynamics of Gender", after the women of the study group notice how easily Abed can see someone's physical flaws, he starts seeing the world through a Robo Cam that picks out insult-worthy flaws of his targets, like a cross between RoboCop and a member of the Plastics. This leads to multiple P.O.V. shots where everything is through a translucent dark filter with an overlay consisting primarily of bright shades of green.
• Yugande from Denji Sentai Megaranger and his counterpart Ecliptor from Power Rangers in Space are colored black and green, in a reference to the cyberspace motif of the former.
• The computer in Lost has a black screen with green text; the castaways later learn that the station was set up in the 1970s.

Music

• Kraftwerk: The cover art for Computer World depicts a PC monitor displaying yellow-green outlines of the band members' heads.
• Roger Waters: The album art for Radio K.A.O.S. features Morse code and dot matrix typography in bright green atop a solid black background, tying in with the album's plot about a boy who can control technology through radio waves.
• The music video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Don't Download This Song" portrays music piracy websites as an alluring bright green (or lime) glow before turning into a hypnotic series of bright green and black rings.

Toys

• LEGO:
  • LEGO Ultra Agents: Terabyte, a former IT specialist turned into a villainous hacker, predominantly uses green colors in his outfit and technology. However, it's surprisingly averted by his laptop, which has a blue display instead of green.
  • Nexo Knights: The Tech Infection Army are essentially Borg-like vampires, which assimilate others through a technological virus. Their color schemes have very little color, mainly sticking to black and grey, but neon green highlights are prominently featured most likely to invoke its association with sci-fi computers.

Video Games

• Animal Crossing: The cover art for "K.K. Technopop" depicts a bright green wireframe render of K.K. Slider's head, doubling as a Shout-Out to the Kraftwerk albums Computer World and Techno Pop.
• Azure Striker Gunvolt 2: Teseo, one of the bosses, is an Adept whose power is turning reality into data and vice versa. His powers are depicted as computer-y, complete with lots of green as his primary color scheme.
• Banjo-Tooie: The screen on the Big-O-Blaster's control console is a scrolling green-on-black monochrome monitor with green scan lines.
• Bomb Rush Cyberfunk:
  • DJ Cyber's crew FUTURISM has the most high-tech equipment of the crews in the setting. Their clothes consist of sleek, white, Y2K inspired clothing with green accents, combining this with Ascetic Aesthetic, and their graffiti also uses bright green and tech motifs in their designs. DJ Cyber himself has a green hexagon on his outfit as well as piercing green eyes under his mask, and he's most known for his brain-scanning spider mech and record blades.
  • Whenever cyberhead Red is sent into his subconsious, the sky is covered in psychedelic green waves. This was initially triggered by being sent into Cyber's machine. The free-flowing instead of purely rigid backgrounds hint at Red's head being more organic than it seems.
• Citizens of Earth: The Cyberspace world in the game, which can be accessed with the help of the Programmer, is presented as an all-black background with a green grid acting as the floor.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day: After the game locks up shortly after the Final Boss battle, Conker tries to get the attention of one of the programmers to fix this bug and give himself the means of dealing a killing blow to Heinrich. The programmer communicates to Conker with bright green text on the bottom of the screen in a format similar to a command prompt.
• Deltarune: Cyber World from Chapter 2 is a Dark World themed around computers and the Internet that features a skyline with green vector lines. The first area of Cyber World, Cyber Field, features green walkways and green neon signs.
• Fallout: The PipBoys, which are a series of Super Wrist Gadgets utilized by the player, have been shown to use a green and black interface. However, not all of them adhere to this trope. For instance, the Pimp-Boy 3 Billion uses an orange and black interface instead, referencing the amber monitors that were also common with old computers, and matching its solid gold exterior. Newer games let you change the interface scheme to whatever color you want, with the Pip Boy's flashlight mode even taking on your chosen hue (although terminals you interact with will remain green).
• Fear & Hunger: Termina: The Machine God presides over a new plane of existence called the "artificial green", which one ending reveals to be a green void containing shining green particles.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • Five Nights at Freddy's World: Virtua-Freddy, an animatronic that appears very briefly when Mimic Ball is used, is a digital animatronic that resembles a green wireframe version of Freddy Fazbear.
  • Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location: HandUnit's display screen has a black and green interface.
• Jack Move: Every computer screen in the game is green-and-black, with little to no other colors, despite the game taking place in the Cyberpunk future of 2120. The game's interface and logo also use bright green colors.
• Mario Party 8: The Mario Matrix minigame centers around the players being transported into cyberspace, represented as a dark green vortex covered in light green vector lines.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man X2: The Sigma Virus is a wireframe hologram of Sigma's head that is entirely green, with the exception of his eyes. However, he will change color as he loses health, turning blue, then purple, then red. The green wireframe portrayal of the Sigma Virus returns in Mega Man X3.
  • Mega Man Zero 3: When Zero enters Cyberspace, everything except Zero, enemies and items becomes tinted green.
  • Mega Man 10: Sheep Man's stage uses a prominent green and black color scheme, with background elements being zeroes, ones, equations and the like, all in green.
• Moshi Monsters: Cosmo was an anthropomorphic calculator with a green screen.
• Persona 5: Futaba, the hacker of the Phantom Thieves, wears a black-and-green bodysuit for her Metaverse outfit. Necronomicon, her initial Persona, is decorated in the same colors.
• Pokémon Scarlet and Violet: Text boxes for any character communicating via the Rotom Phone are black with green scanlines and bright green text.
• Rez: While the game as a whole uses a pretty broad color palette, several levels emphasize green in it's environments, whether as a wireframe or as a texture.
• Sam & Max: Freelance Police: Season 1 Episode 5, "Reality 2.0", uses this trope multiple times. The episode's monochromatic opening sequence is green and black, setting the tone^* but only in the original version. The remaster uses purple-and-black instead. The personification of the internet is a cross between a green-skinned green-haired woman and a computer chip. The text adventure portion, "Reality 1.5", uses green text on a black background in its starting location, switching to a different color whenever Sam and Max go somewhere else.
• Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer: The beams at the exit of each level, the swirling voids that appear in bottomless pits and some skyboxes, and Hackblood are all bright green, fitting the game's focus on supernatural computer hackers.
• The intro for the Sega Master System version of Space Invaders '91 features green-tinted graphics in black screens, despite the game seemingly taking place in the year 2073.
• Starcraft makes heavy use of this trope, with green-tinted monitors, holograms, and nearly any exotic "energy" technology used by the Terrans primarily featuring bright green, to contrast with the more advanced Protoss who get to have blue holograms and energy fields.
• System Shock: SHODAN takes the form of a silver-and-green feminine human head.
• In the Uncle Albert games series, starting from Le Temple Perdu de l'Oncle Ernest, the suitcase-radio displays videos in green.
• World of Goo: The first few levels of Chapter 4, "Information Superhighway", as well as the chapter's overworld and signs throughout the chapter, adheres to a limited palette comprising of mostly black and shades of green, with shades of red thrown in representing infected data.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: Alter Ego is an Artificial Intelligence created by Chihiro that helps you uncover the mysteries of Hope's Peak Academy and aids you in escaping. It shows up as Chihiro's face on a computer screen that emits a bright green glow.
• Queen of Thieves: Zoe is the Gilded Poppy's hacker and her Color Motif is green.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: The first computer Strong Bad used to check his email, the Tandy 400, uses shades of green on its display almost exclusively. Even its ghost is made of large green pixels.

Webcomics

• Awful Hospital: The computer personalities Crash, Chip, and Query are all green faces with a black background.

Websites

• Hacker Typer, a website that simulates Hollywood Hacking, consists of bright green text on a black background.
• Neopets: Neopet v2, one of the website's plotline villains, is a sentient program made by Dr. Sloth, and is portrayed as a low-res green thing.
• Tumblr: One of the website's alternate palettes is "Cybernetic", which turns the website's background black and the text bright green, with other features turning into shades of grey and green.

Western Animation

• Adventure Time: The in-universe video game "Guardians of Sunshine" from the episode that shares its name has a limited color palette, mostly consisting of shades of green. Even when some enemies escape into reality, their palette is comprised of shades of green.
• Archer: As befitting the series' ambiguous timeframe and love of anachronisms, most of the agency's computers (with most of the exceptions being in Krieger's lab) have monochrome monitors, but will display some things in full color on occasion.
• BattleTech (1994) uses bright green HUD overlays for its Enhanced Imaging sequences, representing what the pilots see when interfaced with their mechs' computers.
• Ben 10: Upgrade, one of the first ten Aliens Ben can transform into, is a Blob Monster that sports green Tron Lines across its body. It also has the ability to merge with any machinery and then upgrade it (hence the name) to incredible levels.
• Central Park: The song "Backing Up" from the episode "A Triptych Down Memory Lane" features cyberspace imagery, including a lot of teal, as Owen laments about not living more in the moment when faced with the possibility that the family's external hard drive and all the important documents, pictures and videos it contains is about to be erased forever. The memories are tinted teal, the ground is black with a teal grid, and on the horizon is an undulating pixelated mass with a green-to-blue gradient.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: The family computer, despite being entirely self-aware and capable of conversing in a dry, cynical British voice, is interfaced through a clunky keyboard and a bulky CRT monitor that only displays blocky chunks of bright green text and the occasional very simple image.
• Danny Phantom:
  • Nicolai Technus, ghost of technology, has his mechanized forms take on a palette consisting mainly of black and green, partially because of this trope, partially because of the show's tendency to associate ghosts with those colors.
  • Green is also a common color for almost all of Fenton Family's ghost-busting inventions. Some that have monitors/displays on them are usually either completely green screens◊ with darker green (or red) to display stuff or have black screens◊ with bright green text◊/displays◊.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • In "Power Mad", the virtual reality game that Timmy, Chester, and AJ play features a bright green interface with a stereotypical computer font; the opening level is additionally vivid green and littered with bright green Tron Lines.
  • Played with in "Information Stupor Highway". The episode's depiction of cyberspace mostly averts this by appearing as a series of dark blue tunnels with light blue vector lines. However, the tunnels that correspond to Crocker's computer feature a vivid green tint, and the Crocker Viruses feature bright green skin.
• Gravity Falls: The '80s-era laptop owned (and most likely made) by Old Man McGucket prominently uses a green-and-black color scheme on its monitor, though it is capable of using red too when it's showing something important or foreboding.
• Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures: Questworld is a virtual reality computer system created by Benton Quest, and primarily used by Jonny and Jesse to create and play video games. When logging in, the users would wear headphones that materialized green visors and the effects showed flashes of green light as the wearer's mind was transferred into cyberspace.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series: Experiment 223, "Glitch", has glowing neon green skin and was stored in a green pod, and has the power to go into electronic devices and make them malfunction.
• The title sequence of M.A.S.K. begins with a pseudo-CGI sequence depicting a 3D wireframe model of the landscape surrounding the heroes' base, rendered in black and bright green.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • Gamer wears a black-and-bright-green body suit, and all of his constructs exclusively use a palette of black and bright green.
  • Robostus is a black, red, and bright green palette swap of his civilian form Markov, and sees with an interface that's mostly in bright green. He seizes control of technology with a bright green energy wave, and the lights of the cars or missiles he remotely controls glow bright green. In his second major appearance, he has the ability to trap people and objects in a cyberspace prison surrounded by Matrix Raining Code and can create hologram projections that exclusively use a palette of black and bright green.
• The Simpsons:
  • While the third dimension in the "Homer³" part of "Treehouse of Horror VI" isn't explicitly stated to be in cyberspace, the floating mathematics, floating bits of ASCII, and black-and-green grid floor evoke cyberspace imagery.
  • In "The D'oh-cial Network", the Springfield Elementary Computer Lab "Proud home of the Commodore 64" is initially shown to have older-looking computers with monochrome monitors, which is to be expected for a school of Springfield Elementary's caliber. However, a later scene shows these same computers (plus some iMac G3s) playing a contemporary first-person shooter, so it's likely the black-and-green screens was just for the program used to write code for Springface.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Karen, Plankton's computer wife, has a (for the most part) monochrome monitor for a head, using either lime green or a bright yellowish-green on her display.

Real Life

• The technologist emojis (👩‍💻 and its variants) are pictures of a person using a computer while a large monochrome monitor looms behind them in the Windows 10 and Google versions, with the Google version having generic green lines to stand in for text while the Windows 10 version opts for binary code instead.
• Some software, especially text editors and terminal emulators, allow you to set this kind of theme for a retro look.

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