Franchise Familiariser: Cyberpunk 2077 / Red / Edgerunners (2024 update)

Back in December 2020, CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077. The game allowed players to create a character of their own design and then live a life of crime in the late 21st Century metropolis of Night City, California. After an infamously rocky launch, the game was rescued through updates and a well-received expansion, and has since expanded to include a spin-off TV show, graphic novels, art books and board games.

But did you know that the game and its attendant merchandise is merely the latest part of a franchise which is more than thirty-five years old? If you don’t know your rockerboys from your Arasaka corporate suits from your netrunners, a franchise familiariser may be helpful.

Note: this is an update of an article previously published in 2020.

The Basics

Cyberpunk is a science fiction franchise created by writer and games designer Mike Pondsmith, originally published by his company, R. Talsorian Games, in 1988. Pondsmith named the game after the science fiction subgenre of the same name, which in turn was named after a 1983 short story written by Bruce Bethke. This story was actually published somewhat late in the development of the genre, as several previous works had been important in establishing it, particularly Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and John Brunner’s 1975 book The Shockwave Rider, as well as the 1982 movie Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick’s novel.

Pondsmith and his fellow designers have cited Walter Jon Williams’ 1986 novel Hardwired as being extremely influential on the design of the game, along with Dick and Blade Runner (William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, often arguably cited as cyberpunk’s codifying moment, was not read until later in the game’s development).

To make it clearer that the reader is not speaking about the short story or genre, it’s common for fans to refer to Cyberpunk by one of its edition subtitles: Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk v3.0 or Cyberpunk Red.

Each of the four editions of the game is set in a different decade and reflects the passage of time in the Cyberpunk universe. The original Cyberpunk (1988), now almost always referred to as Cyberpunk 2013, is set in that year and depicts a near-future dystopia where corporations have become as powerful as governments and fight one another for supremacy and where takeovers are more literally hostile than you might expect. The game is predominantly set in Night City, a custom-designed and built metropolis on the coast of Morro Bay, California, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and sees players taking on roles such as mercenaries, corporate players, police officers and netrunners, as hackers are known in this world.

Cyberpunk 2020 is the second and most popular and well-known iteration of the game, to the point that “Cyberpunk 2020” is often used to refer to the entire franchise. It was originally published in 1990 and remained continuously in print for fifteen years, accumulating a vast array of supporting supplements and adventures. The game’s rule system, Interlock, was highly praised for being customisable and allowing players to much finely adjust their character’s development through skills rather than being tied into much broader levels (the approach favoured by the medium’s heavyweight game, Dungeons and Dragons, for which Pondsmith had worked on some sourcebooks). The setting was also praised for its attitude and punk ethos.

After experimenting with a spin-off project revolving around young characters who get superhero-like powers from technology, CyberGeneration, the game returned properly in 2005 with Cyberpunk v3.0. The game switched to the Fuzion system, advanced the timeline to the mid-2030s and also adopted a transhuman approach, with much more sophisticated SF ideas such as humans downloading their consciousness into robotic bodies and thus becoming immortal. The setting also dropped some of the aesthetics of the original setting, Pondsmith reasoning that fashion and styles would move on. However, despite some praise for trying to move past cyberpunk clichés and explore more advanced ideas, the game had some negative feedback for exactly the same reason, as well as the change in rules.

Cyberpunk Red (2020) tacitly omits v3.0 from the canon and instead serves as a direct sequel to Cyberpunk 2020, with the timeline now advanced to the 2040s but the old cyberpunk styles and ideas are still very much around. The newest edition of the game also acts as a prequel to Cyberpunk 2077 (the tabletop game and the video game developed in tandem), with Pondsmith confirming that a Cyberpunk 2077 sourcebook updating the Cyberpunk Red timeline and rules to 2077 will follow.

As well as the tabletop roleplaying game and the video game, the franchise consists of tie-in novels and graphic novels, several board games, the first edition of the popular Netrunner collectible card game and the Cyberpunk: Arasaka Plot mobile game.

In September 2022, CD Projekt Red collaborated with Mike Pondsmith, Netflix and the Japanese animation studio Trigger to release Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a 10-episode animated TV series set about a year before the game. The show received critical acclaim, and was credited with spurring fresh interest in both the video game and tabletop roleplaying game. The former was updated with a tie-in mission exploring the fate of some of the characters from the show, whilst the latter received a new introductory boxed set based on the TV series. In December 2023, the franchise received a further boost in popularity due to the release of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, a sizeable expansion to the video game.

Future projects are in development. A second Cyberpunk animated show is in the planning stages, whilst a live-action television series has also been proposed. A full sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, codenamed Project Orion, is also in development. The Cyberpunk Red tabletop roleplaying game is also expanding, with a new setting based in the 2077 time period of the video game expected to launch in 2025, alongside the Night City sourcebook.

MORE AFTER THE JUMP

A Potted History of Cyberpunk: Part 3

See Part 1 and Part 2.

As with any new movement, it’s barely even started before people start saying it’s over. In the case of cyberpunk, the genre was facing declarations of its mortality before the ink was cool on William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. But through the late 1980s and early 1990s, key works in the genre continued to appear from new talent.

The Queen of Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk had been, at least so far, a male-dominated subgenre. In 1987 Pat Cadigan became the first woman to publish a major work of the genre, Mindplayers. In this novel a young woman faces mental delusions after using a stolen cyber-interface and has to be “cured” by a type of mental hacker, a mindplayer. Cadigan’s novel delved into the interrelationship between technology and identity in a way that recalled Philip K. Dick. She expanded on many of these themes in sequel novellas and the related novel Fools (1992).

Her second novel, Synners (1991), is a more epic exploration of cyberpunk ideas. It is set closer to the present day than most cyberpunk works, in a more recognisable version of Los Angeles, as individuals from both sides of the law get swept up in an impending technological crisis.

Cadigan moved on to explore other types of fiction (ironically just after The Guardian proclaimed her the “Queen of Cyberpunk” in 1994), but in later years returned to the genre thanks to her work on the Alita: Battle Angel franchise, penning a novelisation and an original novel in the setting of the 2019 movie.

Other women writing in the genre soon gained prominence, most notably Lisa Mason for her debut novel Arachne (1990) and Melissa Scott for her 1994 novel, Trouble and Her Friends (1994).

Playing in a Cyberpunk World

Given the technological nature of cyberpunk narratives, it wasn’t long at all before cyberpunk stories started appear in the form of video games. One of the first was The Screamer (1985), a CRPG featuring, unusually for the time, real-time combat. The Megami Tensei and Metal Gear series both began in 1987, having cyberpunk themes even if the settings were not outright cyberpunk.

It wasn’t until the 1990s the technology existed to really do cyberpunk games justice. Captive (1990) was a cyberpunk take on Dungeon Master, a first-person, real-time “dungeon” crawl, with the dungeons now being technologically-advanced bases and the enemies being robots. The game was enjoyable, but a fairly obvious SF remix of an earlier game. Its sequel, Liberation (1993), was vastly more ambitious. Liberation created a huge cyberpunk city in (primitive) 3D where every building could be searched and explored, and the player had to follow a chain of clues to find an imprisoned captive. In a similar vein was the Mercenary trilogy – Mercenary (1985), Damocles (1990) and The Dion Crisis (1992) – the latter two of which featured an entire star system (complete with relativistic effects as you travelled between different worlds), though its cyberpunk credentials were less impressive.

Particularly notable was Flashback (1992), a platform game with an incredibly-animated main character, heavily inspired by Prince of Persia (1989) and Another World (1990). Flashback was a significantly longer game with a much more involved cyberpunk story, featuring the main character having his memory erased by invading aliens and having to fight to retrieve it whilst defeating the invaders. The game was hugely successful, spawning a direct sequel, Fade to Black (1995) and a remake (2013).

Also in 1993, Bullfrog Productions released one of the greatest cyberpunk games of all time. Syndicate saw the player taking control of a super-corporation complete with its own paramilitary force, which the player can upgrade and develop by taking over rival territory. The game casts the player as a morally dubious corporate business leader who can pursue his or her agenda through outright violence, more surgical assassination techniques or using a “persuadatron” to override people’s implants and turning them into unwitting slaves. Syndicate was a huge success and was succeeded by Syndicate: American Revolt (1993) and Syndicate Wars (1996), as well as an uninspired first-person remake, Syndicate (2012) and a superb “spiritual successor,” Satellite Reign (2015), which expanded impressively on the original game’s themes in a massive, open-world cyberpunk city.

Almost as influential was Beneath a Steel Sky (1993), a huge adventure game featuring an epic narrative set in a futuristic city. The game’s visual design was created by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons and the game was a big hit. The developers were side-tracked by the Broken Sword series, which was a massive hit, but released a long-awaited sequel, Beyond a Steel Sky, in 2020. In 1997 a similar adventure game was released based on the film Blade Runner, and was a cult success.

That same year Squaresoft released Final Fantasy VII, the first game in their long-running fantasy series to incorporate cyberpunk ideas such as class struggle, industrial squalor and biological-machine interfaces. The game was a colossal success, resulting in a remake in 2020 and additional games in the series exploring similar ideas.

In 2000, Ion Storm released what many consider the ultimate cyberpunk video game: Deus Ex. Set in the near future, the game focuses on augmented humans caught up in a complex global conspiracy. The game allowed for massive, unprecedented and rarely-matched-since amounts of player freedom and influence on the outcome of the plot. Widely regarded as one of the single finest and most important video games ever made, it has enjoyed a sequel, Invisible War (2003) and three prequels, Human Revolution (2011), The Fall (2013) and Mankind Divided (2016). Human Revolution and Mankind Divided delved more deeply into cyberpunk themes of transhumanism, identity and corporate corruption.

Cyberpunk became more of a background setting for video games such as Mirror’s Edge (2008), Hard Reset (2011) and Far Cry: Blood Dragon (2013). More in-depth exploration of cyberpunk themes came in games like Transistor (2014) and the Watch_Dogs series (2014-present), which depicts the transitional period as a more modern world gives way to a cyberpunk future.

The largest and most popular cyberpunk video game of all time – and the most contentious – launched in 2020. Cyberpunk 2077, based on Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, features jaw-dropping graphics and impressive freedom to explore a futuristic city, coupled with a compelling, rich storyline and memorable characters. However, the game launched with a plethora of technical issues and missing features, which gave the game a mixed reception. Launched a few months earlier, the much smaller, tighter and more focused Cloudpunk sees the player as a sky taxi driver undertaking some very odd jobs over the course of one strange night, set in a beautifully-realised city.

Cyberpunk continues to be a rich genre and source of ideas for future video games to mine.

Satirising the Genre

Heading into the 1990s, cyberpunk was well-established enough for writers to start poking fun at it. Of course, satirical takes on the genre had existed before, with Judge Dredd starting barely after the genre really even got off the ground. But as the genre had evolved, a slight tendency for it to become po-faced and self-serious had developed.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson poked fun at the genre in his seminal work Snow Crash. Main character Hiro Protagonist (a deliberate pun) is a pizza delivery driver and hacker who discovers a computer virus that can affect the human mind in the real world, leading to a dizzying journey of discovery taking in Sumerian history and mythology, political struggle and cryptography (expanded on his non-cyberpunk epic, Cryptonomicon, and its prequel/sequel trilogy, The Baroque Cycle). The novel is part of cyberpunk but also challenges and subverts the genre.

Similarly metafictional is Headcrash (1995), by the genre-namer himself, Bruce Bethke. The novel features a protagonist who sets himself up in an online VR community as a cool, trend-setting guy only to realise he is one of millions of people trying to do the same thing and as a result has just become another kind of anonymous everyman. Bethke used the novel to communicate his disdain for the sub-genre of cyberpunk which simply copied Neuromancer, a derivative strain he called “Neuromantics.”

Not satirical, as such, but certainly revisionist, was Jeff Noon’s seminal novel Vurt (1993). This book featured a cyberpunk-like narrative, but rather than relying on computers and technology, it instead employed biological devices to create a shared hallucination which any human can access through colour-coded feathers. The novel thus achieves much of the same impact as cyberpunk through a different means. The novel was hugely successful and was followed by a sequel, Pollen (1995), and prequel, Nymphomation (1997).

Enter the Matrix

Ironically, it was well after the highwater mark of cyberpunk as a distinct literary genre that it finally broke through to the mainstream with a huge, hit movie. The Matrix, written and directed by the Wachowskis, was a complex and mind-bending story about a young hacker who discovers that the real world is a lie, a computer simulation generated to entertain the human race, who in reality are imprisoned living batteries for a machine intelligence. With visceral kung fu action, mind-boggling philosophical asides and astonishingly cool production and costume design, The Matrix was a box office and critical smash, as was its collection of animated prequel films, The Animatrix (2003).

Unfortunately, the two sequel movies proper, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions (both 2003) were less well-regarded, criticised for obtuse plotting and emphasising action over the storytelling. Debates over the trilogy’s place in the cyberpunk genre continue (the film features no kind of overt class struggle, a key part of the literary genre, though the theme of humans being cogs in a machine is present), but it was important for making certain cyberpunk ideas, such as machine-human interfaces, more readily accepted than they had been previously. The series will return later this year with a new entry, The Matrix Resurrections.

Integration

As the years passed, cyberpunk as a discrete genre became less of a readily-identified thing. “Cyberpunk novels” became less commonplace, with elements of cyberpunk instead being integrated into more established SF genres. Peter F. Hamilton’s sprawling space operas are primarily in that genre, but also feature machine-brain interfaces and towering cities of mega-skyscrapers familiar to cyberpunk fans. Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002, adapted for television in 2018), a hyperviolent, body-swapping corporate thriller set in a far future San Francisco, was praised as a modern cyberpunk classic, but its sequels set on other worlds are almost in completely different genres. J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 television series is a space opera but also featuring virtual reality cybernets and computer simulations so real they cannot be told apart from real life. Even Star Trek, the most traditional of SF universes, dabbled in cyberpunk ideas by introducing the holodeck and biological-machine hybrid races such as the Borg.

Cyberpunk was arguably also defeated by real life. As a genre, cyberpunk is mostly near-future and posits a future of massively overcrowded cities. But the world’s population is clearly never going to get to the point to require such ridiculously massive cities with mile-tall residential blocks. Real-life computer development has been in some ways more advanced than posited by early cyberpunk – which mostly failed to predict the arrival of smartphones – but also failed to account for the fact that humans are likely too squeamish to accept the level of body modification and invasive brain procedures posited by the genre. With hackers and computer viruses taking down power plants and damaging infrastructure, the idea of wiring a computer interface straight into your cerebral cortex has become distinctly less edifying.

But in some respects, by exploring ideas of massive social and economic unrest caused by technology, the gaping and dramatically-growing equality gap between rich and poor, and the rise of systemic exploitation and those rebelling against it, maybe cyberpunk ended up being far more prescient than it first appeared. In many respects we are now living in a cyberpunk world, albeit one featuring slightly less neon than was imagined in the past.

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A Potted History of Cyberpunk: Part 2

Part 1.

Neo-Tokyo is About to Explode

The backstory to Akira has Tokyo destroyed by an unknown phenomenon in 1992. Hours later, World War III begins and devastates the world, leading to the annihilation of most of the world’s major cities. Thirty-eight years later, the city of Neo-Tokyo has arisen out of the ashes of the old world, a city of gleaming mega-skyscrapers surrounded by the desolate ruins of the old city. The story follows a biker gang led by the charismatic Kaneda and backed up by his best friend Tetsuo. Tetsuo becomes afflicted by strange abilities, the result of a government experiment into psychokinetic energy, and loses control, going on a murderous rampage that attracts the attention of the government. Kaneda’s attempts to help his friend are complicated by the growing danger that Tetsuo presents to his friends and to innocents, and by a government conspiracy to cover up their culpability for these events.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira was a cyberpunk epic, more than 2,000 pages long, (both drawn and written by Otomo) serialised in Young Magazine over eight years. It began in 1982, attracting immediate critical acclaim and attention, with Otomo soon being courted to develop a film adaptation. Otomo rejected initial overtures, insisting on having full creative control and being allowed to use a fluid animation style far beyond that seen in most anime productions, which necessitated a massive budget. The rising fame and acclaim of the manga saw his requirements eventually met and the feature film version of Akira (featuring a hugely compressed version of the manga’s storyline, with many subplots and characters omitted) was released in 1988, more than two years before the manga itself concluded. A phenomenon at home and in the West, Akira played a key role in the rise in popularity of anime outside Japan and also the rise of the cyberpunk genre in Japan.

The manga even improved real-life technology: a colourised version of the comic was the first comic to ever use digital colouring techniques, which would later become standardised in the industry.

Akira was hugely influential and important in the development of cyberpunk, but its influence was not felt outside of Japan for some years.

The Cyberpunk Visionaries at…Disney?

Disney were an unlikely choice to produce the second movie to expand on cyberpunk’s visual identity. As it happened, the development happened almost by accident. Animator-director Steven Lisberger had grown fascinated by computer graphics in the late 1970s and had become intrigued at the idea of creating a film completely based around them. Computer graphics were increasingly used in films – such as the targeting computers and simulation of the Death Star trench run in Star Wars (1977) – but the hardware was simply not up to the task of rendering an entire movie in anything like a reasonable time frame, or at an acceptable level of detail.

Lisberger was frustrated, but decided that traditional forms of animation could be used to simulate computer-generated imagery, in particular the use of backlit animation, which was seen as a bridge between the disco aesthetics of the late 1970s and the computer-driven effects that started coming into more widespread use in the 1980s. He took the idea to several studios, but none bit apart from Disney. Disney wanted to make more daring and interesting films, and took a chance on the idea after being impressed by test footage. However, Lisberger quickly discovered that Disney was incredibly cliquey. The animation division was less-than-friendly to outsiders and he was unable to recruit any Disney animators to work on the project, having to outsource to a Taiwan studio instead.

The resulting film, released in 1982, was TRON. An oddball film, it features a man who is literally teleported into a computer system controlled by a hostile AI. Inside the computer system he finds programmes trying to “rebel” against the dictatorial control of the AI and helps them in their struggle, eventually succeeding despite incredible odds. The film was a modest success and its dazzling visuals – particularly the lightcycles and tanks – were acclaimed. The story wasn’t entirely coherent and perhaps a tad too fantastical to be hugely influential on the nascent subgenre, but it did overcome the perception that cyberpunk could be more cerebral than visually spectacular.

In the meantime, it fell to a batch of American literary authors to bring the idea to a wider audience…and give it a name.

Enter Cyberpunk!

In 1980, American SF author Bruce Bethke wrote a story about a young man, Mikey, who is a troublemaking computer hacker who has online friendships and interfering parents. Mikey uses his skills to overcome interference from his parents in his life. Bethke pondered various titles for the story but settled on “Cyberpunk” – or, in the novel-length version, Cyberpunk! – as a name to sum up his rebellious protagonist.

“Cyberpunk” did the rounds of various magazines and collections before being finally published in 1983 in Amazing Stories. Though the story was delayed before being published, the title became known in editorial circles and started being used more widely; editor Gardner Dozois is credited with helping spread and normalise the term in discussing an increase number of stories utilising the same approach: near future, computer-heavy, usually involving an interface between human and machine and featuring rebellious protagonists. A key moment came in 1984 when Dozois wrote an article for The Washington Post which popularised the movement to the masses for the first time.

Cyberpunk had a visual and audio aesthetic, thanks to Blade Runner. It had a name, thanks to Bruce Bethke. But what it was still lacking was a work that codified and summarised the movement, a Lord of the Rings which everyone could point to and say, “Yes, that’s what this is all about.”

Dead Televisions

William Ford Gibson was born in Conway, South Carolina, in 1948. Mostly raised in Virginia, his family moved around a lot when he was young. After the abrupt death of his father, he found his home town confining and small-minded, and escaped by reading a mixture of science fiction and Beat literature. He moved to Canada in 1967, ostensibly to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War, but he later noted he wasn’t in much danger of being drafted after he spent an interview with the draft board talking about an ambition to imbibe every “mind-altering substance in existence.”

In 1977 Gibson published his first story: “Fragments of a Hologram Rose.” The story relates the experiences of a jilted lover who relies on artificial dreams to sleep in a polluted, enigmatic story. Gibson’s output was limited and his discontinued writing for several years, until he attended an SF convention and met author John Shirley, who shared his interest in punk music. Shirley introduced Gibson to Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. All four were interested in the idea of fusing science fiction with postmodernism to bring more contemporary ideas to the genre, a furthering of the “New Wave” of the preceding decade but on a greater scale. Inspired and fired up, Gibson wrote a short story called “Burning Chrome,” a story of two freelance hackers who fall in love with the same woman. They undertake various crimes using advanced software called “icebreakers” to operate in “cyberspace” – the first time the term ever appeared in print – against the backdrop of the Sprawl, a massive mega-city that has accumulated out of the Eastern Seaboard metropolises. Gibson had preceded that story with “Johnny Mnemonic,” a story about a man with a cybernetically-enhanced brain carrying password-protected information, the contents of which he has absolutely no idea.

A key moment came at ArmadilloCon, a science fiction convention held in Austin, Texas in late 1982, when Gibson, Shiner, Sterling and Shirley appeared on a panel called “Behind the Mirrorshades: A Look at Punk SF.” On the panel and in discussions in rooms and in bars afterwards, the foursome and assorted other writers and fans thrashed out the idea of a new form of SF which mixed fashion, drugs and politics, whilst embracing some of the new, cool aesthetics of the time: Japan, MTV and early experiments in CGI.

The development of Gibson’s writing abruptly curved upwards in 1982 when editor Terry Carr of Ace Books offered to publish Gibson’s first novel, an offer which Gibson was both awed and slightly confused by, as he didn’t have a novel in development. In fact, he considered himself to be at least five years away from being capable of writing a novel, but scrambled to meet Carr’s request, recognising that the opportunity was not to be squandered. Gibson continued to develop ideas from his short fiction, setting the novel in the Sprawl which both “Johnny Mnemonic” and “Burning Chrome” had inhabited, but expanding a story across a grander scale. Gibson suffered reversals of confidence during the writing process – panicking after a viewing of Blade Runner that he’d be accused of ripping the film off – but ultimately completed the novel after rewriting it a dozen times.

The novel, published in July 1984, was entitled Neuromancer, the title being a play on “necromancer,” a term for someone able to raise the dead. The novel follows computer hacker Henry Case, a washed-out computer hacker hired for one last case – heavy shades of noir fiction – and encounters mysteries and events culminating in the discovery of a powerful AI straining to overcome the limitations placed upon it by humanity.

Neuromancer was an immediate critical success, winning the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards on publication, and Gibson was encouraged to write a sequel (despite trying to sabotage the prospect during the writing of Neuromancer itself by closing down narrative avenues for the story to continue). Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive(1988) were almost as well-received as Neuromancer itself, the three books becoming collectively known as The Sprawl Trilogy. A collection of Gibson’s short fiction, Burning Chrome, was published in 1986 as an addendum to the trilogy.

No sooner had Gibson completed the work, then he distanced himself – somewhat – from the subgenre he’d helped popularise and moved into the realm of alternate history, joining forces with Bruce Sterling to write a novel set in an alternative, more advanced Victorian setting. The result was The Difference Engine, which helped give rise to the “steampunk” genre.

Dicing on the Edge

In 1986, Walter Jon Williams released the novel Hardwired. Williams was an author in the right place at the right time: he was halfway through writing his novel about futuristic rebels equipped with neural interfaces fighting corporations based in Earth orbit when Gibson dropped Neuromancer, and the book was well-placed to capitalise on the booming interest in cyberpunk that followed. Whilst cash-in books in the wake of cyberpunk of were not uncommon, Williams found that Hardwired garnered a much more positive reception, with strong sales and critical praise.

Williams was also a tabletop gamer, and for some years had been playing in a postmodern superhero roleplaying game run by his friend George R.R. Martin and also including members of an informal Albuquerque-Santa Fe SFF author collective: Melinda Snodgrass (who was about to start work on Star Trek: The Next Generation), Victor Milan, and John J. and Gail Gerstner-Miller. Martin had the brainwave of turning the roleplaying game into an anthology series, resulting in the Wild Cards series, with a number of authors from the nascent cyberpunk movement getting involved, including Pat Cadigan and Lewis Shiner. Wild Cards wasn’t cyberpunk, but used some of the same literary languages and weaponry to invigorate the superhero genre (across the Atlantic, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons had the same idea in a new comic series they were writing for DC, Watchmen) in the same way that cyberpunk had done for science fiction.

Influences extend backwards and forwards, and even as Williams took part in the direction of moving from a tabletop game to writing fiction, another group of writers took the ideas he had put forwards in Hardwired and translated them into a tabletop roleplaying game. Most notable in this group was Mike Pondsmith, who had worked in board games and tabletop roleplaying games for many ears. Pondsmith had played Dungeons and Dragons (1974), which he was cool on, and Traveller (1977), a space opera roleplaying game which he was much more enthusiastic about, going as far as rewriting the rules to his own specifications as a game called Imperial Star (which he kept to himself for legal purposes).

Pondsmith’s first solo-developed game was Mekton (1984), which replicated anime-style mech combat in an original setting (albeit one based, in aesthetics at least, on Mobile Suit Gundam). The game was a success and he founded his own company, R. Talsorian Games, to exploit it further.

Pondsmith had heard news about the growing cyberpunk movement but had not read any of the work coming out of it. As well as working on his own games, he was providing support to TSR on their Forgotten Realms adventure line and was also consulting with West End Games on their Star Wars licence. However, a group of friends and co-designers (including Mike Blum, Colin Fisk, Dave Friedland, Will Moss and Scott Ruggels) suggested they work on a cyberpunk game and encouraged Pondsmith to read Hardwired. Impressed by the novel, Pondsmith and his friends set about re-engineering it into an original setting: a futuristic Californian metropolis called Night City in the improbably distant future of 2013. Perhaps a tad cheekily, they realised the genre name “cyberpunk” had not been trademarked and snatched it up for their game.

Released in 1988, Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future (the first edition of the Cyberpunk RPG line) was an immediate smash hit success in the world of roleplaying games. Whilst tabletop roleplaying games had expanded from their fantasy origins to incorporate a number of different genres and ideas, Cyberpunk’s emphasis on a near-future setting, complete with familiar (if enhanced) weapons and politics was refreshing. The rules for hacking and cyberspace also added a different feel to the game.

Cyberpunk was a hit and numerous expansions and supplements followed. Pondsmith repaid Walter Jon Williams for the original idea by licensing Hardwired for a series of supplements incorporating its setting and ideas into the game. The second and arguably definitive edition of the game, Cyberpunk 2020, was published in 1990. The fourth and more recent edition, Cyberpunk Red, was published in (appropriately) 2020.

Cyberpunk’s success inspired other games to dive into the same genre. The popular universal rules system GURPS (1986) developed several cyberpunk spin-offs, but arguably the biggest and most successful derived game was Shadowrun (1989), which somewhat bizarrely fused Cyberpunk with Dungeons & Dragons.

By the start of the 1990s, cyberpunk had become more widespread and popular, but also seemed to be running out of steam. Gibson had moved on to other genres, and space opera was making a resurgence. Articles and thinkpieces asking if cyberpunk was dead started appearing. It was clear that cyberpunk was not dead, but it was going to have to evolve to survive.

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A Potted History of Cyberpunk, Part 1

Cyberpunk 2077

Thanks to the high-profile release of the video game Cyberpunk 2077 and its attendant controversies, more people are talking about cyberpunk as a genre and concept than at any time since the 1980s, and probably even more than then.

Defining the genre was tricky even thirty years ago, with the letter pages of SFnal magazines and fanzines occasionally descending into heated battles as people debated what was part of the genre and what was not, who was part of the movement proper and who were its progenitors. There was also a long-running argument – still hashed out today – about works that truly embodied the spirit of cyberpunk versus those merely borrowing its aesthetics for commercial purposes, or perhaps those who held that cyberpunk was a more tightly-defined literary genre as opposed to a setting.

 

Netflix's Altered Carbon

What’s in a Name?

At its simplest, cyberpunk is a portmanteau of two works: cyber – referring to computers – and punk – referring to anti-authoritarianism and rebelling against the established order. In his Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia (1995), SF critic John Clute offers a bald summary of the term: “stories set in a computer-dominated environment with a streetwise, anti-Establishment culture.” In Burning Chrome (1986), Bruce Sterling and William Gibson (two of the genre’s most notable figures) defined it as “low-life and high tech.” In the titular short story from that collection, originally published in 1983, Gibson coined the phrase “the street finds its own uses for things,” which has become a widely-quoted aphorism for the street-level use of advanced technology.

However, when the term “cyberpunk” is mentioned, it also brings up certain images. Usually a vast, futuristic city, sometimes a future version of an existing location like Tokyo or Los Angeles or a completely new conurbation, such as California’s custom-built Night City, or a new urban mass that amalgamated out of previous cities, such as Mega-City One or the Sprawl, two separate ultra-cities which both formed out of existing US cities along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. A lot of people wear sunglasses, even at night. Chrome is everywhere, and is cool. Virtually everyone is a cyborg, from extreme techno-fetishists who have replaced limbs with weaponry or techno-enhanced prosthetics to the everyday people who look just like we do, but might have bionic eyes or a computer interface port behind their ears.

A key complaint and criticism of cyberpunk is that whilst “cyber” shows up in almost all examples of the genre, the “punk” element may or may not be present. Punk usually refers to low-level, “street” kids and people who are non-conformist, anti-authoritarian and anti-corporate, who work for themselves and despise the idea of selling out. In cyberpunk works, the protagonists are often idealistic, seeking to bring down the supercorporations who now wield unfettered power, or sometimes the government which has become enhanced by corporate power.

Cyberpunk is also generally held to be Earth-based, or at least planet-bound. Space travel is often available in a cyberpunk setting but is not a key part of the genre; offworld colonies are sometimes used as a place of escape or refuge for the ultra-rich, leaving the poor masses behind. Sometimes space operas visit Earth or other planets to find vast, semi-dystopian cities and people integrated with technology, such as Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy with its vast, cyberpunk-ish arcologies on Earth or even those instalments of Star Wars which dwell on events on the city-planet of Coruscant, but generally these are held to be space operas first and foremost, with cyberpunk elements of secondary interest.

The genre is often held to be inherently a dystopian vision of the future where technology has run amok and been used to solidify the power of corrupt governments, corporations and other elites at the expense of the masses, who use what technology they can to fight back. Utopian cyberpunk is an oxymoron, with some holding that the closest would be something like Star Trek, in which advanced technology is available to everyone and is genuinely used to improve the lifestyles of all humanity, which in this setting has abandoned capitalism and the acquisition of wealth and power as personal motivations.

Cyberpunk is also often said to be a direct successor to the noir thriller genre, often employing a detective – either a traditional gumshoe, a police officer or a hacker analogue – as the main character or in a supporting role. If the main character is a police officer, they frequently become disillusioned by the corruption exposed during their investigation and quit in disgust, or come into conflict with the system and go rogue. Director James Cameron in fact proposed “technoir” as an alternative name for the genre in his 1984 film The Terminator, but it never really caught on.

 

Doctor Who's Cybermen in their 1966 debut appearance, in The Tenth Planet.

Protocyberpunk

Antecedents of cyberpunk are numerous and arguable. A key early ancestor is Alfred Bester’s Tiger! Tiger! (1956), better-known under its revised title of The Stars My Destination. The novel predicted a world where corporations would become more powerful than governments and that the human body would be enhanced by machine implants. The protagonist is, unusually for science fiction of the era, an antihero, a ruthless man named Gully Foyle who is driven arguably sociopathic after he is left to die, marooned in space. His unwavering commitment to destroying his enemies leads him to commit numerous crimes under the justification of his own righteousness; his faith wavers at key moments but at the end of the story he has become a religious icon for his commitment and his revelations about the nature of reality. Foyle is not a laudable figure – he is a rapist and murderer – but his status as an antihero and one-man force of destruction has made him something of a progenitor of later cyberpunk protagonists (or antagonists).

Other works contain elements of later cyberpunk without perhaps fully committing to them: William S. Burroughs’ The Soft Machine (1961) features cyberspace-like rationalised hallucinations, albeit achieved through drugs and biological means (a theme revisited in Jeff Noon’s popular 1993 quasi-cyberpunk work Vurt). Isaac Asimov’s Robots saga, beginning with I, Robot (1950), asks hard questions about the morality of creating artificial intelligence and what limitations should be put on them, whilst Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968) features cyborgs hanging out on the street. British SF TV series Doctor Who several times addressed the issue of merging biological and machine life, with first the Daleks (debuting in the serial The Dead Planet in 1963) and then, more relevantly, the Cybermen (The Tenth Planet, 1966) addressing what happens when man becomes more machine than biological.

 

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), a key cyberpunk progentior.

Early and Semi-Cyberpunk

The first work which is often cited as cyberpunk is Philip K. Dick’s 1968 short novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The novel revolves around a bounty hunter named Deckard who is contracted to terminate six androids who have escaped from the offworld colonies and fled to Earth to live normal lives among the population. Deckard pursues them across a post-apocalyptic, semi-dystopian North America where the populace huddles in futuristic cities such as San Francisco and Seattle. A common pastime is using “empathy boxes” to link to a communal virtual reality centred around suffering and martyrdom. It is also revealed that almost all animals have been wiped out in a nuclear war, leading to people acquiring robotic animals as pets, with only the ultra-rich able to afford real animals.

The status of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – and its later loose film adaptation, Blade Runner (1982) – as cyberpunk remains contentious as many elements of the genre are missing, such as the role of ultra-powerful corporations. Deckard is also very much not a punk hero, lacking idealism at all and in fact suffering existential ennui which he hopes to assuage by acquiring a real goat to replace his robot sheep. He later has an affair with an android, and experiences doubt over whether he himself is an android or a real human. The novel has a somewhat surreal ending where he finds himself performing the same tasks as the martyr in the empathy boxes’ virtual reality and finds a wild toad, which later turns out to be a robot.

Some of Dick’s later work also employs cyberpunk tropes, perhaps most notably Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Set in a dystopian near-future where the US democratic system has collapsed after a second civil war, it concerns a protagonist, Taverner, who status as a genetically-engineered TV star is abruptly lost when his identity is somehow erased from existence. Trying to desperately avoid being identified as a non-entity, which would reduce him to one of the near-starving, poverty-inflicted majority whose rebellious instincts are only kept in check by television and vacuous entertainment, he goes on the run and eventually is able to restore his identity. The story and background themes, particularly the student-led revolution which is gathering against the technologically superior elite, are at least cyberpunk-adjacent.

Alice Sheldon explored themes which would later be labelled as cyberpunk in her 1973 novel The Girl Who Was Plugged In, published under her pen name of James Tiptree, Jr. The novel takes place in a dystopian future where powerful corporations create genetically-engineered celebrities, who are controlled by operators via a neural interface. These celebrities engage in elaborate games of product placement to get around strict laws on corporate advertising. The book delves deeply into the idea of identity and the idea that the face a person wears is not necessarily their true one, here taken to extremes through technology.

J.G. Ballard explored societal alienation – a common theme in cyberpunk – in numerous works, but a particularly interesting take was in Concrete Island (1974), where a car accident leaves the protagonist stranded on a median strip, the titular concrete island, between several motorway intersections where traffic is constantly moving at dangerous speeds. Unable to leave without being killed, the protagonist joins the subculture of the concrete island, where other rejects from society have gathered, which soon devolves into conflict. The book recalls the spaces outside the city or between the lines of civilisation in cyberpunk, where characters fall and it is questionable if they will emerge again. More directly evoking cyberpunk is Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), where the main character Robert moves into a high-rise apartment block on the outskirts of London. The apartment is a self-contained city in itself, with its own bank, supermarket, shopping mall, gym and school. The high-rise provides so many amenities that its inhabitants can choose to never leave. Some, fearful of reports of crime outside the block, take up that option. Power failures and social and class stratification soon set in, with the richer inhabitants of the upper floors hoarding their wealth against the poorer (but more numerous) inhabitants of the lower levels, leading to a highly localised civil war and revolution (of which the outer world proceeds in apparent ignorance). The novel foreshadows the arrival of the mini-arcology or self-contained “megablock” that becomes a key feature of many cyberpunk stories, whilst thematically the idea of an “ideal society” rapidly devolving in class warfare is pure cyberpunk, with technological warfare (in this case, exemplified by the building’s lifts becoming strategic chokepoints) being a key part of the struggle. The novel was filmed in 2015 by Ben Wheatley with Tom Hiddleston in the title role, to great effect.

In 1976, Doctor Who tackled a key cyberpunk theme in the serial The Deadly Assassin, when it had the Doctor return to his homeworld of Gallifrey to do battle with his arch-nemesis, the Master. At a key point in the narrative, the Doctor has to seek information in the repository of all Time Lord knowledge, the Matrix (a not-uncommon name for such a database). Because the repository is so vast and complex, the best way to use it is via a neural interface to generate a virtual reality through which the Doctor can move in an illusion of the computer system being an actual place. This is one of the earliest examples of such a conflation of computer systems, virtual reality and brain interfaces being used in a manner that would later become extremely common in cyberpunk.

An interesting take on the genre appeared in 1977, when Christopher Priest published A Dream of Wessex. Much of Priest’s work is concerned with layers of reality, doubles, shifting or blurred existences and identity surviving across universes. Given this interest, it is remarkable that only once, in Wessex, he used technology to explore the idea. In this novel an elite group of thinkers create a virtual reality interface which can transport the collective unconscious of some of Britain’s greatest minds into an illusory world where their intelligence and experience can be mined for ideas on how to ensure humanity’s long-term survival. The idea of forcibly transporting people into a cyberspace against their will as a way of extracting information is a common cyberpunk trope, but the idea of doing it stealthily so the target is unaware of what is happening is intriguing.

In 1978, the BBC launched a new science fiction TV show, Blake’s 7. Blake’s 7 is primarily a space opera about a band of plucky rebels trying to bring down the dystopian Terran Federation, but some cyberpunk themes do proliferate. The rebels are a mixture of genuine idealists, profit-driven criminals and career sociopaths (reflecting the often-mixed band of protagonists encounter in cyberpunk fiction). The population on Earth (apparently reduced by atomic war) are kept under constant surveillance and control in domed mega-cities, made docile by drugs and ruled over by corrupt officials. The war with the Federation often takes the form of a game of technological one-upmanship, with Blake’s early advantage of finding an advanced alien starship swiftly matched by the Federation’s improving spacecraft and weapons technology, particularly in the field of AI where many of Blake’s victories are helped by his securing of the ORAC supercomputer. Memory and personality alteration through technology, drugs and brain implants abound. Blake’s 7 is notable for its mature exploration of such themes (as compared to its American contemporary, Star Wars, and its much more superficial and heroic struggles) and also its nihilism: in the final episode the much-reduced crew are betrayed and brutally gunned down by the enemy after their erstwhile leader, the cynical Avon, had effectively had a personality breakdown.

 

John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1975), arguably the first novel to fully embody the key themes of cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk’s Forgotten Visionary: John Brunner

In 1968, British SF author John Brunner published the first of three thematically-linked novels which would effectively set the stage for cyberpunk. The first of these novels is the best-known, Stand on Zanzibar, set in an overpopulated world which is threatened with ecological catastrophe by population pressure. Overpopulation is a key plot point in cyberpunk (often explaining the vast cities where the action tends to unfold), but beyond that Brunner engages with other ideas: a powerful supercomputer forms an important part of the plot, whilst television has become interactive, with viewers becoming part of the programme itself. Genetically-engineered bioweapons proliferate, and nightmarish supercorporations dominate the world.

The Sheep Look Up (1972) explores further the notion of the Earth becoming uninhabitable due to toxic waste, pollution and climate change. The declining quality of the environment sparks societal collapse and war. Attempts to regulate ecological damage are watered down for economic reasons. Ecological protestors turn to violence when their peaceful protests are ignored, eventually sparking a terrorist campaign against the US government. The "cyber" is missing from the argument, but the "punk" is very much present, and the novel's depiction of ecological catastrophe would become a familiar cyberpunk trope.

The third of the three works is The Shockwave Rider (1975), a novel which is less proto or early cyberpunk, but actually just proper cyberpunk. The book takes place in a near future dystopian city where the protagonist uses his computer hacking skills to escape detection and avoid pursuit. The term "worm," for a computer virus, was first coined in this novel. The book's story is pure cyberpunk, where the protagonist, Nick, is a computer programmer who becomes aware that an education program reported as educating children is in fact indoctrinating them to further the interests of the state (effectively a criminal oligarchy), as well as genetically-engineering children to their own ends. Nick rebels and goes up against the state in an escalating battle that ends with them trying to drop a nuke on him; his response is a powerful computer virus that exposes their schemes and plans and blows open the government's duplicity. The novel, unusually for Brunner and for a lot of cyberpunk, ends optimistically.

 

Judge Dredd (1977-present), a key satire of cyberpunk tropes told from the POV of the fascist enforcers of the corrupt government's laws.

The Anti-Cyberpunk

A strong early example of cyberpunk, or at least an example of anti-cyberpunk (or even a satire of the genre), is the British comic book character Judge Dredd. Debuting in the pages of the 2000AD anthology comic in 1977, Judge Dredd is a law enforcement officer on the streets of Mega-City One, a vast super-metropolis stretching along the Eastern Seaboard of the former United States. The Judges are judge, jury and sometimes executioner all in one, able to dispense summary justice to the half-billion inhabitants of the crowded streets of the city, sometimes getting it right and sometimes (in the case of some Judges, maybe almost always) getting it wrong. Dredd and his fellow Judges are, effectively, the fascist enforcers of a totalitarian, unelected state who are not above using corporations and their latest gizmos and entertainment products to keep the population quiescent. Revolutionary fervour intermittently burns but is expertly redirected by a form of ultra-local nationalism: people are extremely loyal to the mega-blocks they live in, and rather than directing violence against the police state which keeps them cooped up all day (the unemployment rate runs at something between 92% and 98%, due to robots, AI and automation running almost all services), they instead tend to declare war on neighbouring blocks, resulting in psychotic “block wars” which act as pressure valves on the city’s malcontents. Dredd is unusual in that he believes absolutely the propaganda of being an unwavering avatar of the law, sometimes leading to him siding with the people against their oft-corrupt rulers, but more often than not unquestioningly following their orders.

If Joe Dredd is not a cyberpunk protagonist, he at least illuminates cyberpunk themes, and in fact arguably has done so more consistently and more frequently than any other character: the comic and Dredd himself continue to run today, with the timeline advancing in realtime, so forty-four years have passed in the story and for the character. Dredd himself experiments with rebelling against the system, at one point betraying his fellow Judges to support a pro-democracy call for election…which formally elects for the oppressive status quo to continue. Judge Dredd’s relentless cynicism and satire makes for one of the most interesting explorations of the genre, if one that too many readers seem to take on face value as a mindless action story.

Ridley Scott's seminal 1982 film, Blade Runner, which gave cyberpunk both its key visual and musical identities.

Visualising the Genre

In 1982, two major works were released which had a profound impact on the nascent genre, particularly its visuals. Most notable was the film Blade Runner, a very loose adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Like the novel, the film features a bounty hunter named Deckard (here played by a taciturn Harrison Ford, keen to shed the wisecracking image of Han Solo and Indiana Jones) who is commissioned to track down a band of rogue androids. Unlike the novel, the action does not criss-cross the western United States, instead being restricted to just one location, Los Angeles in 2019. Blade Runner’s Los Angeles would become perhaps the most definitive visual take on a cyberpunk city ever: a sprawling urban landscape of endless industrial complexes surrounding a conglomeration of vast skyscrapers emblazoned with familiar logos, whilst the techno-pyramid of a monstrously powerful super-corporation squats menacingly above the poor masses just trying to get by on the streets.

The film’s status in cyberpunk is sometimes disputed. There’s nary a brain/AI interface in sight and if Deckard becomes a rebel against the system, it’s something of a reluctant one. But so much cyberpunk draws on Blade Runner’s aesthetics, and its central question of what it means to be human in the midst of so much existentially-overloading technology is so core to the genre, that such arguments feel forced. Blade Runner is almost the last word in the visual imagery – if only superficially – of cyberpunk. It also had a strong impact on the audio perception of the genre: Vangelis's synth-heavy soundtrack inextricably bound cyberpunk to the sound of synthesisers and any cyberpunk work which suggests that maybe people in the future won't be in love with a 1980s musical fad faces an uphill struggle gaining acceptance with some fans (particularly Cyberpunk 2077 and its apparently controversial idea that people might have a more eclectic and wide-ranging musical taste by the late 21st Century).

The other work would come from Japan. Katsuhiro Otomo had already been playing with cyberpunk forms in his debut manga, Fireball (1979-81). Set in a future city secretly ruled by the ATOM supercomputer though human proxies, the story follows a band of rebels who are trying to expose the truth and inspire a revolution. Otomo quickly realised that the setup was too simplistic and hurriedly wrapped the story up to explore another idea. This resulted in Domu (1980-81), a more contemporary story exploring the psychic link between an old man and a child. Although more satisfied by this story, Otomo realised that there was scope for a much, much more ambitious story combining the two elements into one.

On 6 December 1982, Otomo published the first issue of a new serial in Young Magazine. The story appeared under a very simple, short name: Akira.

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CYBERPUNK tabletop RPG launching alongside CYBERPUNK 2077 next month

Talsorian Games have confirmed that Cyberpunk Red, the latest edition of the long-running Cyberpunk tabletop RPG franchise, is to launch on 14 November, just ahead of the release of the Cyberpunk 2077 video game (set in the same universe) five days later. They also have a detailed breakdown of the game contents here.

The Cyberpunk RPG franchise began in 1988 with the release of the original Cyberpunk RPG, set in the year 2013 in the new metropolis of Night City, a custom-build technical megalopolis located in Morro Bay, California. It depicted high-end corporate warfare and espionage in a high-tech future (which is now, of course, an alternate past), with street hustlers and hackers working missions on the Net and in the real world on behalf of shadowy interests.

The RPG hit its stride with the release of the second edition, Cyberpunk 2020, in 1990, which became arguably the definitive version of the game and remained in print for fifteen years, spawning dozens of expansions, several novels and a stand-alone spin-off, Cybergeneration, aimed at younger players. The game also inspired the immensely popular collectible card game Netrunner as a spinoff (although the current edition of the game, Android: Netrunner, has used a different setting since 2012).

A third edition, Cyberpunk V3.0, was released in 2005 and saw the game move to a further-future transhuman setting, with major changes to the rules system that were received negatively.

Cyberpunk Red features a revamped (and better-received) rules system and advances the timeline of the tabletop game to the 2040s. The title - which was decided before CD Projekt Red optioned the franchise for a video game - comes from the skies over Night City, which have turned red after particulate matter thrown into the atmosphere during nuclear exchanges in the Fourth Corporate War.

Cyberpunk Red's digital edition will launch on 14 November. Its physical release - a chunky 456 page rulebook - will be on 19 November, the same day as the video game, although the publishers note that COVID-related delays are possible.

Cyberpunk ranks as one of the great, venerable tabletop RPGs, alongside the likes of Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller, Shadowrun and World of Darkness, and it's good to see it back in print and its world about to be introduced to vastly more people than ever before through CD Projekt Red's video game.

The World of Cyberpunk 2077 by Marcin Batylda

Night City, California, 2077. A city of netrunners, megacorps, edgerunners, gangs and outcasts. Nearly destroyed in the Fourth Corporate War of 2023 (when a tactical nuke went off deep inside the Arasaka Towers), the city has survived flood, famine and war to emerge stronger and more influential than ever before. Now an independent city-state free of outside governmental control, Night City is attracting more people than ever before.

The World of Cyberpunk 2077 is, as the title implies, a background setting book for CD Projekt Red's forthcoming roleplaying video game, Cyberpunk 2077 (due for release in November). It's also set in the same world as Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk pen-and-paper roleplaying game (best-known for its Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020 editions), which makes this book doubly worthwhile, not just as scene-setting for the video game but also as a lorebook for those interested in trying out the pen-and-paper game. Semi-coincidentally, the latest edition of that roleplaying game, Cyberpunk Red, should be hitting shelves in the next couple of months.

The book is 192 pages long, full colour, with every page combining text exploring the world of Night City with art from the video game. Some of this is concept art, some are video game screenshots and some are fake (and often RoboCop levels of subversive) adverts for in-universe products. How about some Real Water®? Only 99E$ per gallon!

The book is presented as a series of articles from the Night City Inquirer, an anarchic news and press organisation determined to get the real truth out there (with the implication that maybe you shouldn't take everything in the book as being 100% reliable).

The first section focuses on history, mostly alternate history since the Cyberpunk universe deviated from our own in the 1980s. The devastating impact of climate change, resource conflicts, declining nation-states, growing international digital supercorps, a new Dustbowl and three corporate wars fought in the 1990s and 2000s are detailed, along with the founding of Night City on Morro Bay. The devastation of the Fourth Corporate War gets a spotlight, followed by the lengthy rebuilding process for both Night City and the Free State of Northern California.

Once that is covered, there's a lengthy section on the technology of the setting: cyberware, weapons, vehicles, braindance (a potent VR experience where people can go for rides in other people's lives, experiences and hallucinations) and netrunning. The implications of cybernetic technology are covered and the dangers, such as cyberpsychosis, whilst the moral question of how much of yourself you can replace whilst still being considered human is briefly pondered (although not in too much detail).

The longest section details Night City itself, its districts and neighbourhoods. This is fairly bare bones - which given its length is a surprise - since a lot of the detail of the setting will be found in the game itself. It does provide an overview of what districts to avoid after dark (unless you want to get jumped by gangs), where the most exclusive bars are and where might be the best place to procure some shady items. Further chapters look at the the society of Night City, from the rich megacorp regional directors down to the homeless, and at the city's forces of both law and disorder: the police, the gangs and the Nomad tribes who live beyond the city limits. The book ends with an interview with Rogue, an infamous operative of the 2020s who's now in semi-retirement but unofficially still working as a "fixer."

As these kind of companion books go, The World of Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty good. The artwork is excellent, as you might expect given that the book is able to draw on seven years' worth of concept art, finalised design work and renders. The production value of the book is very high and the writing is surprisingly engaging. Lore fluff for video games can be hit or miss, but the immense amount of background material developed previously for the pen-and-paper game means there's a ton of information available on the factions, politics and tech of the setting that goes far beyond what you'd normally expect from this kind of tie-in. There's enough meat here to help run a pen-and-paper game in 2077 Night City as well as prepping for the video game.

In terms of flaws, there's not too many. The book seems to assume knowledge on the reader's part about certain characters like Johnny Silverhand and Morgan Blackhand which the overwhelming majority won't have. There's also a distinct lack of deep context on some things, like the gangs. Some of the gangs are based on fairly obvious cliches (the Haitian gang is called the Voodoo Boys, because obviously that's the only thing anyone knows about Haiti; both the Japanese Arasaka Corporation and the Tyger Claws yakuza gang are about honour and face in public, whilst being corrupt behind the scenes), but without the context of the video game it's hard to know if they get more development than that. The book's maps of Night City are also a bit odd, omitting the shoreline, so it's hard to tell at a glance which is an inland district of the city and which is a coastal one.

Beyond that, The World of Cyberpunk 2077 (****) is a readable and solid worldbuilding guidebook, and it does several jobs of providing background for the game, acting as an advertisement for it and providing context for the new Cyberpunk Red pen-and-paper game. It is available in the UK and USA now.

CYBERPUNK 2077 gets release date and bonus Keanu Reeves

Over seven years after first announcing it, CD Projekt Red have finally provided a release date for Cyberpunk 2077, which is either the most eagerly-awaited video game of the next year or the most eagerly-awaited entertainment product of all time, depending on your hype level.

To commemorate the date, CD Projekt Red have released a new cinematic trailer. They have also confirmed that Keanu Reeves will be playing the iconic role of Johnny Silverhand, an ex-rock star who is now deeply immersed in the world of corporate espionage. Reeves voices the character and also had his likeness digitally scanned.

Set in Night City, California, in 2077, Cyberpunk 2077 tells the story of a hacker who gets in over their head. Unlike their previous Witcher games, Cyberpunk 2077 will allow players to create their own protagonist and customise them extensively to tackle a long, branching storyline which responds to their actions with numerous sub-quests.

Cyberpunk 2077 will be released on 16 April 2020 on PC, PlayStation 4 and X-Box One.

Massive gameplay demo for CYBERPUNK 2077 released

CDProjekt Red has released a massive 48-minute gameplay demo for their upcoming title Cyberpunk 2077. Previously shown behind closed doors to journalists and industry figures at video game conventions, CDPR decided to release the video due to overwhelming public demand. They caution that this is an early build of the game and many things may change before the final release.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a vast, open-world SF RPG set in Night City, California. The game allows players to go wherever they want in a huge world and pursue a vast array of storylines, activities and jobs, as well as customising their characters significantly. There is also a complex, detailed main storyline that can be followed.

The game is being made by some of the same team who worked on the Witcher trilogy of video games and is based on the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper RPG system created by Mike Pondsmith, who is closely collaborating on the video game.

Cyberpunk 2020 has no official release date, but I'd be surprised if we saw this before 2020 at the earliest.

Altered Carbon: Season 1

It's a world where human beings have become digital information, swapped between bodies, backed up on the cloud and sometimes illegally copied. It's a world where centuries-old rich folk - the 1% of the 1% of the 1% - have formed a vaguely bored and utterly corrupt elite watching over the rest of the human race. It's a world utterly unprepared to deal with a man named Takeshi Kovacs, an Envoy from Harlan's World, an utterly formidable soldier who swaps bodies as easily as swapping guns. He is called in to solve an impossible murder, and in the process flushes out the demons of his own past. Welcome to Bay City, Earth, 2384.

A few years ago, Hollywood suddenly decided that cyberpunk was going to be the next big thing. Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner 2049 were commissioned as films, Harebrained Schemes resurrected Shadowrun as a video game franchise and (over in Poland) CD Projekt Red began developing the Cyberpunk 2077 video game, whilst Netflix picked up Duncan Jones' Mute as an original movie. Netflix also commissioned Altered Carbon, a 10-episode adaptation of Richard Morgan's 2002 novel of the same name, an early classic of 21st Century science fiction.

The brief cyberpunk bubble has burst with the disappointing under-performance of Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner 2049 (despite the latter's visual and thematic brilliance), which must have led Netflix to feeling nervous about Altered Carbon. A violent, complex story rooted in graphic violence and a fair amount of sex whilst asking questions about humanity, immortality, death, family and morality, it's dense, sprawling hard-edged and sentimental, with a fairly complex plot. Early reviews have also been mixed.

Fortunately, these fears can mostly be laid to read. Altered Carbon is a dramatic, compelling drama with great performances, outstanding visual effects (the astonishing CGI may be the finest ever put on the small screen, even if it comes at the cost of a surprisingly small number of well-used sets) and which has a lot to say about the dangers of immortality, the corrupting influence and power of money and the little people going up against an uncaring system. Little of what Altered Carbon has to say is new, but the renewed relevance of its themes to modern society certainly makes it worthwhile to reassess them.

Our main focus is on Takeshi Kovacs, played for most of the run-time by Joel Kinnaman. Kinnaman has been criticised in the past for being a bit bland, but is surprisingly good in the main role. He is great in the action scenes, nails the painful interrogation sequence from the books and does a good job of portraying the different characters of Kovacs and Ryker (the former owner of Kovacs' new sleeve). Kinnaman's range is not great but he does "brooding, annoyed intensity" very well. He is even exceptional in a sequence that feels like Kovacs just walked out of the books, where he manipulates a woman into giving him vital information by (cynically) engaging her empathy.

We also get lengthy flashbacks to Kovacs' time as an Envoy, where he is played with earnest charisma by Will Yun Lee. These sequences also see significant screen-time for Kovacs' former Envoy allies Reileen Kawahara (Dichen Lachman) and Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry), both of whom are outstanding and powerful (especially Goldsberry, who has to be severe, military, charismatic and emotional at the same time, all without damaging the character, and pulls it off). The Envoy/Harlan's World backstory has been significantly changed for the TV series, which some fans are concerned about. The primary motivation for these changes is that in the book Kovacs is a loner who lives in his own head most of the time, rarely making connections with other human beings and only reluctantly being drawn into friendships and alliances with other people. These changes are designed to make Kovacs a more relatable character, giving him more of a family and making him less of a solo operator. This is due to the limitation of the television format: no matter how good the actor, spending eight or ten or thirteen hours with one person would eventually get old.

In the present-day storyline, the TV show gives dramatically expanded roles to Kovacs' sentient hotel sidekick (Chris Conner's Edgar Allan Poe replacing Jimi from the books, thanks to the Hendrix Estate not giving out the image rights), Bay City police detective Kristin Ortega (Martha Higareda), ex-soldier Vernon Elliott (Ato Essandoh) and, via flashbacks,  This makes the series less claustrophobic than the books but also less intense, and the intensity of the novels is kind of one of the points.

The expanded casting is a success: Martha Higareda gives Ortega a sense of intelligence and a barely-contained fury which explodes on several rather memorable occasions. As effectively a co-lead to Kinnaman in several episodes, Higareda makes Ortega a compelling protagonist and another window on this future world, with her Christian family divided over the morality of re-sleeving and cheating divine judgement. Essandoh has less to do until the last few episodes, when his complicated family situation gains renewed relevance, but gives a solid supporting performance as a damaged human being looking to fix what's gone wrong with his life. Chris Conner is simply outstanding as Poe, and any regrets about not getting Jimi from the books are soon swept away as we do get to see the sentient hotel AI joining forces with Kovacs as a partner (an idea hinted at in the novel but left resolutely unfulfilled), which is filled with both humour and pathos.

James Purefoy is also excellent as Laurens Bancroft, the 300-year-old "Meth" whose murder (and subsequent amnesiac resurrection in a new sleeve) sets the story in motion. Purefoy eats up these kind of morally conflicted-but-charismatic roles for breakfast (see also his outstanding turn as Marc Antony in HBO's Rome) and is on top form in this series. It's also good to see his actor's integrity stands firm (so to speak): in Rome he was annoyed by how the actresses were asked to disrobe on a fairly regular basis but not the male actors, so demanded a scene be written to show his solidarity (again, so to speak) with them. This fine tradition continues unabated in Altered Carbon, and it would be disappointing if he didn't rib Kinnaman about the latter's reluctance to also appear unadorned (complete with some mildly ridiculous strategic towel/camera placement).

The pacing is also pretty good. Netflix shows often struggle with how to structure their stories over 12 or 13 hours (often because their stories don't warrant 13 hours in the first place), but Altered Carbon only has 10 episodes to fill and a fairly dense 500-page SF novel to draw on, so each episode is fairly full to bursting with character moments, worldbuilding, flashbacks and action. Several episodes draw back from the bustle and shine with laserlike focus: episode four with its torture storyline is uncomfortable viewing but it does help get into Kovacs' mindest. The resolution to that story is arguably the novel's "Red Wedding" moment (with an arguably better cathartic outcome) and the TV show nails it. Episode seven is mostly set on Harlan's World and explores Kovacs' backstory in much greater detail and works really well.

Alas, the show is far from flawless. Some of the changes to the Envoys and backstory make sense but others do not, and will make adapting the second and third books more difficult. There's no real tackling of the idea that the stacks may simply be recording a copy of someones personality and memories, not their actual consciousness (the ability to double-sleeve in fact pretty much proves that people still die, with just a copy living on, just there's no real existential exploration of this idea), although as I recall the novel doesn't really delve into that either. The "murder mystery" storyline occasionally gets forgotten about for entire episodes, and some developments in the case feel like they came out of absolutely nowhere. Kristin Lehman's Miriam Bancroft is a decidedly unengaging and uninteresting character. Most annoying is the show's decision to keep deploying "mumbly dialogue syndrome", with the characters (particularly the accented Kinnaman and Higareda) either forgetting to enunciate properly or (more likely, given there's plenty of scenes where they're fine) the sound not being mixed properly. The original music is also pretty forgettable, although there's some good use of songs.

Altered Carbon (****) is a hard-edged and interesting science fiction show with incredible visuals and good performances, suffering a little from some muddy plot developments and under-exploration of the central premise. With a second season already in the planning stages, it'll be interesting to see where Netflix takes Takeshi Kovacs next. The show is available worldwide right now on Netflix.