ReBoot was the first fully CG cartoon, made in the 90s, and told the story of a virtual world inside a computer. The characters were representations of programs and data. However, there is something within this virtual world that doesn't make sense.
Game Cubes
Yes, ReBoot had something called a game cube years before Nintendo did. A game cube occurred whenever the computer's user loaded a game. The cube would descend upon the virtual city, and anything the cube landed on would be trapped within the game. Any of the city's citizens trapped in the game could load game data into themselves, becoming a part of the game.
Time within the virtual city is measured in micro- and nanoseconds, with one of the characters saying a task "might even take one whole second!" It's obvious, then, that the virtual world moves much faster than our own world, which makes sense, considering the virtual world is just a representation of a computer. To the characters in the virtual world, a second is like an entire day.
When the characters are participating in a game cube, they are interacting with the computer user. Logically, this would mean that time would flow at a rate appropriate for humans. Considering a game could last for several minutes or even an hour or more, a single game should feel like an eternity to the characters of the virtual world. However, the games seem to end in a matter of nanoseconds compared to the action happening in the rest of the city. In fact, the time difference between the rest of the world and the game cubes is a major plot point of the latter half of season 3, except they do it backwards.
In season 3, three of the main characters get trapped in a losing game and change themselves into game sprites so that the game will take them with it instead of destroying them. They then end up getting loaded into other computers, trying to find their way back home. They end up aging faster than the characters they left behind. It is later explained to them that game time is faster than their normal time, so they age quicker. However, in actuality, they should have remained the same age, as they would be spending hours in games and the rest of the virtual world would be progressing at their normal rate.
