After decades of action-heavy sci-fi guff, Cyberpunk is finally stepping back into the limelight. Films like Blade Runner and Robocop inspired a huge number of games and films, but many of these failed to emulate the original spirit. Films like The Matrix rekindled the genre, but ditched the sense of ethical apathy for a quick & dirty conspiratorial head-fuck. Quite literally, if you count those brain-USB sockets.
Cyberpunk is all about creating worlds that sit right on the edge of moral bankruptcy. Spineless politicians make decisions to please corrupt corporations, while the rest of the world gets shafted by carefully institutionalised inequality. Cyberpunk originally found success in the wake of the early 1980's recession. It doesn't feel like a coincidence that we're starting to resonate again with it now.
After decades of fighting pantomime-villains because a massive corporations turns out to be bad, a new generation of passionate developers are determined to make the genre relevant to those who have political opinions that stretch beyond Rage Against the Machine lyrics. It's unsurprising to see the sci-fi legends of the future concentrating on videogames instead of trying to get into making films. Why bother with the restrictions of a lens and camera, when you can create without compromise in a digital world?
Slick noir-presentation always goes down a treat, but it's that technology-driven sense of twitchy paranoia that I think really brings Cyberpunk to life. One of the settings I've always thought nailed this best is a pen & paper RPG called Cyberpunk. CD Projekt RED - the excellent developer behind The Witcher games - recently acquired the rights to create a videogame set in this universe.
The Cyberpunk setting is rich, vibrant, and fascinating. After a socio-economical collapse leads to a period of martial law, the US government starts relying on major corporations to maintain order. Corporate sabotage is par for the course, and all-out warfare between major competing companies isn't unheard of.
The privately-funded police are still there to keep the peace, and are sure to show up whenever a beefcake cyborg loses the plot. Replacing parts of your body with enhanced metal prosthetics comes at a risk to your ongoing sanity - get too detached from what it is to be human, and things tend to get sticky. God bless rapid-response railgun units.
11 comments so far...
CunningSmile on 22 Jun '12 said:
Ever since reading Neuromancer at the age of 9 cyberpunk has always been one of my favorite genres (I told my careers advisor at school I wanted to be a corporate raider, she looked confused) so i'm really glad there is a bit of a resurge at the moment.
I could never figure out why MS bought the game rights for as rich and textured an RPG universe as Shadowrun and released a subpar arena shooter instead of something story driven. Good to hear that Cyberpunk itself is being treated with a bit more love.
sonicmark on 22 Jun '12 said:
It would be most amusing to see the CoD franchise try to go in this direction, so then every game in the future would have to be cyber punk-y to keep up with the competition
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mistergrimm on 22 Jun '12 said:
Black Ops 2 kind of is, tbh
Thos. on 22 Jun '12 said:
Not sure about RoboCop - but don't forget the movie version of Johnny Mnemonic. Disappointing on release, I wouldn't mind giving it a watch now to see how it's aged.
fedris the red on 22 Jun '12 said:
Dude, shhh - don't tempt the bandwagon gods
fedris the red on 22 Jun '12 said:
*looks both ways furtively* I actually liked Johnny Mnemonic - it had Henry Rollins playing the most unlikely scientist ever in it.
If you want some other good Cyberpunk material don't forget the Max Headroom TV series and the book Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams (I think someone at R. Talosorian games liked that book a lot because I believe they brought out a Hardwired source book for Cyberpunk 2020.)
CunningSmile on 22 Jun '12 said:
Watched it about a year ago and it's aged badly, not helped by Keanu and Dolph having some sort of more wooden than thou competition. However if you haven't seen it I can really recommend Strange Days, if you can get past the world ending in 1999 stuff it's a really nice film noir/cyberpunk blend that has aged really well.
And I preferred Henry Rollins character in the book it's based on. It was a drug addicted dolphin with PTSD.
fedris the red on 22 Jun '12 said:
The dolphin was in the film, I'd actually forgotten this until SFX magazine put up the 50 worst sci-fi films of all time and mentioned that there was also Seaquest DSV on TV at the same time that JM came out and that also had a psychic dolphin in it which didn't really help the films credibility.
CunningSmile on 22 Jun '12 said:
Was it really? As I said I only rewatched it last year and don't remember him at all. Admittedly I found it so bad I may have fallen asleep at some point and missed him.
And don't diss SeaQuest
It's by far the best series from the early '90s that desperately wants to be the next Star Trek about a submarine exploring the future (admittedly a small list of competitors)
fedris the red on 22 Jun '12 said:
Yeah, Henry Rollins played Spider if I remember rightly (I don't think it was Ice T that played Spider.) not sure who played the dolphin - Flipper? Robert De Niro in a wig? (He's a damn good actor...)
Also in Gibson's original JM short story the female protagonist was called Molly Millions, (I can't remember if she was still called that in the film) and she went on to have major role in Neuromancer and if you read Neuromancer you get to hear what happened to "her boy Johnny." (*Possible spoiler* It didn't end well.)
I don't lol often but I believe I just did!
Decent_Jam on 22 Jun '12 said:
Well I was about to quote Thos to avoid talking out of context, but it seems Johnny and co have derailed this thread pretty solidly. Anyway, I was going to say I thought the film aged pretty badly and was pretty average, there were some interesting ideas here and there but generally it just looked pretty cheap and Keanu, as pointed out, isn't the most convincing protagonist. Ironic I suppose when he took the world by storm in the Matrix soon after.
As for Cyberpunk itself, I dislike the overuse of the term (not so much here, but it comes up a lot), but I do enjoy it. What I did play of Syndicate made me feel bad that it wasn't better than it was. It lacked a certain something but I'm not sure what it was.
The idea of augmented reality is a really cool one, and any technological near-future film (think I, Robot and Minority Report for starters) really grabs me and takes me in, I love how they take modern ideas and take them through in interesting directions.
In all there's a lot to be said for style - I guess that shouldn't be a surprise given that for Apple it's basically their business model.