Cyberpunk 2077 Genre Roots and Cyberpunk Red Guide

After years of waiting, we are now merely three months away from the planned release of CD Projekt’s next big game – Cyberpunk 2077. As such, now might be a good time to check out this PC Gamer article that features a few quotes from Cyberpunk 2077’s level designer Miles Tost and tries to determine just how true to the cyberpunk genre the game is going to be. An excerpt:

If you wanted to sum up cyberpunk in a single handy soundbite, it’d be the one that Neuromancer author William Gibson has wheeled out in countless interviews: “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

So if you’re not one of the people craning their necks from down on the street, then you most likely deserve the guillotine, or whatever the cyberpunk equivalent is. Probably just a guillotine with a few cables and neon lights stuck on the side, to be honest. Whether all this matching of genre features and game tropes is happy coincidence or careful design, it’s hard to tell. But CD Projekt certainly seems to understand what has traditionally made cyberpunk interesting.

“To us, cyberpunk explores a dystopian world of low life and high tech in which we focus on street-level stories. Our protagonist is not the kind that is out to save the world,” Tost says. It’s an absolutely textbook definition of the genre, one that takes in the wisdom of cyberpunk scholars like Bruce Sterling, Lawrence Person and especially Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk pen-and-paper RPG, now consulting on 2077.

And then, you might want to follow that up with this article that takes a look at Cyberpunk Red, the latest iteration of the pen and paper RPG that inspired CD Projekt in the first place. A few sample paragraphs:

Both Cyberpunk 2077 and Cyberpunk Red owe their existence to a tabletop RPG designed by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games in 1988. Its rules have been through several iterations, the most popular version being Cyberpunk 2020, which described a corporate-run Night City in the Free State of Northern California in what was then a hard-to-imagine near future. As the actual year 2020 approaches, Cyberpunk Red moves the setting forward, streamlining rules and assumptions along the way.

Pondsmith describes the relationship between R. Talsorian’s tabletop RPGs and CD Projekt Red’s videogame by comparing them to Star Wars, saying that if his original game was the first movie, “right now Talsorian is running The Empire Strikes Back, while 2077 is essentially Return of the Jedi or beyond even.”

The first taste of Cyberpunk Red is a ‘Jumpstart Kit’, a set of rules aimed at beginners. There’s a worldbook that outlines the setting, complete with an introductory scenario and a set of six ready-made characters with roles like Rockerboy, Tech, and Nomad to choose from. A full-length rulebook is currently being written, with R. Talsorian running on Valve Time: ‘It’ll be done when it’s done.’ Right now, the jumpstart kit is enough to get your first game of Cyberpunk Red going.