Category Archives: Cyberpunk

Thirty years on from the release ofRobocop, applied futurist Tom Cheesewright notes thatthe films vision of cyborgsecurity and the privatisation of public life has become a startling reality

Talk to people about cyborgs, and even 30 years on from its arrival in cinemas, RoboCop remains a common point of reference.

Strutting the streets of Detroit in his shiny metal hide, Officer Murphys robotic reincarnation really stuck in peoples minds, as did the rest of Paul Verhoevens vision: rampant consumerism and the privatisation of public life.

But how does this vision stack up against todays reality? Is it already here, yet to come, or perhaps totally unfeasible?

If you want to know about the privatisation of public life, and particularly public spaces, ask any skateboarder.Large swathes of our cities have been turned over to private property developers, and are now policed as such.

Try to skate in the wrong place, and you might not get a warning shot from an over-zealous cyborg. But you could beshut down by a security guard on a Segway.

Theres no physical fusion of biology and technology here, but Id argue its still a cyborg.

The sci-fi vision of cyborgs as machine and human in the same body were driven by the technology of the Cold War era, when the term was coined.

Scientists knew that the human bodys frailty was a weakness in environments like outer space or a nuclear fallout zone, but our minds outstripped the power of any computer.

If we could find a way to closely connect the human mind to physical might, the result might be unstoppable.

The physical might of machines hasnt moved on that far, but computers are now much closer to human capabilities.

Weve also developed much better interfaces between the two.

The result is computers we can control with a single spoken command, phones that respond to the slightest touch or swipe, and self-balancing scooters that only require us to lean in the direction we want to go.

We are all cyborgs now. We just dont recognise it. In our minds, all cyborgs look like RoboCop.

This more subtle blending of human and machine represents the future of security today.

Researchers around the world continue to develop exoskeletons for the human body to enhance our physical strength.

Imagine citiessurveilled by roaming drones its already happening in Dubai.

But why put a human in harms way when they could be sat in the safety of a control room, remotely piloting a drone?

This is increasingly the reality of modern warfare, and witha long tradition of military technology making its way into law enforcement, it wont be long until these techniques are implemented on our streets.

Imagine citiessurveilled by roaming drones its already happening in Dubai. There wont be one operator for each drone; maybe one for everyfive or every10.

Most of the time they will be entirely autonomous, roaming the streets, taking pictures, and answering questions. Only when there are criminals to be caught will the humans take over.

This fits with the changing picture of work in a broader sense.

Replacing humans takes real artificial intelligence, something that is a little way off.

RoboCops world showed us what might happen if automation and globalisation arent countered

But with some intelligent automation as software companies are now calling it a much smaller amountof humans can achieve a lot more.

Science fiction is an important part of imagining the world we might one day live-in, and considering the risks and opportunities.

RoboCops world showed us what might happen if the effects of automation and globalisation arent countered.

Rising violent crime follows a growing gap between rich and poor as robots take more and more work something the Sutton Trust warned about just last week.

The technology may be more subtle and sophisticated than the clunking armour of 1980s imagination. But the issues driving tomorrows security challenges remain very real.

Tom Cheesewright runs Book of the Future.com, where he uses his knowledge to give a view of the future

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RoboCop at 30: how its cyberpunk vision of the future became a reality - iNews

(Last Updated On: July 13, 2017)

The creator of the Cyberpunk tabletop game franchise, Mike Pondsmith, has taken up an interview with another publication site to detail what its like to take Cyberpunk the board-game and turn it into the upcoming video game currently in development at CD Projekt Red.

According to the interview between Mike Pondsmith and publication site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, information on the progress of the game as well as Pondsmiths role in helping the development of Cyberpunk 2077 comes to light.

In an attempt to keep the whole thing short and readable, Pondsmith is said to be a key collaborator over the last four years of CD Projekt Reds involvement in the Cyberpunk 2077 game. Pondsmith shared that he feels he has been very important to the development process, and that his explanations surrounding the propertys world have been useful for the team:

At the beginning of the project, I talked to them a lot, every week. For a long time they didnt realise Id worked in digital, but Ive been doing pen and paper for 20 years and digital for fifteen. When I was explaining Cyberpunk to them, I was explaining the mechanics in a way that they understood and that helped them to realise I could contribute more to the actual design.

Although there are no videos showing any gameplay or in-game footage as of this moment, it is said that Pondsmith is trying to keep things level-headed along with CDPR so that the game can portray everything necessary at launch. Additionally, he explains how the team at CDPR is approaching putting content in the game that reflects features from the pen and paper version that will work in the 3D version of the tabletop game:

A lot of the conversations weve had on the team are not can we do this? We can do just about anything. Instead, its me explainingwhy I did it in pen and paper, and then we figure out if we need it again, and whether it serves a different purpose in a video game. I know why flying cars are there in the original but thats not necessarily the same functionality in 2077. Everything is taken apart in terms of what it does to the game, how it differs from tabletop, and getting the right feel.

In other words, both Pondsmith and CDPR know that they can put anything into Cyberpunk 2077, but instead of just throwing content into the game to make it cool, they instead are going through content and weighing what works in the pen and paper version and what will work in the 3D version. If each piece of content serves a purpose and propels the video game to becoming that much better, I can only hope that the content is well optimized and not a glitchfest.

Cyberpunk 2077 is in development as we speak, and although the game is slated to be for PC and the latest consoles, it will be ready when it is ready. Lastly, you can read the full interview between Mike Pondsmith and the publication site over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

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Mike Pondsmith Talks Creating Cyberpunk 2077 With CD Projekt Red - One Angry Gamer (blog)

Cyberpunk 2077 remains one of the most highly anticipated RPGs, between the developers pedigree and the Cyberpunk setting.

Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the tabletop roleplaying game in 1988 and a consultant on the game, appeared today in a video interview with GameReactor. While the legendary writer and game designer remained fairly tight-lipped (otherwise there are tall Polish people waiting to kill me), he did provide some new details.

His tabletop features unconventional classes like journalist, rockstar, executive, and others. The interviewer asked whether those will actually be in Cyberpunk 2077 and Mike Pondsmith replied positively.

Yes, you can. Theyre all going to be there, but I can tell youre going to find some surprises about how weve done it and I think youre really going to like it. Theres a lot of subtlety going on there. Adam (Kiciski, CD Projekt REDs President and co-CEO) and I spent literally like a whole week messing with the ways of implementing that, so you get the most feel for your character.

In case youre wondering, the classes (actually called roles) in the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG are nine:Cop, Corporate, Fixer, Media, Netrunner, Nomad, Rockerboy, Solo, Techie, and Med-Tech.

Will CD Projekt RED deliver them all in the final game? Its hard to say. Cyberpunk 2077 feels like its been in development forever, given that it was announced in May 2012, though the Polish studio only focused on it once The Witcher III: Wild Hunt was completed. There are reportedly more developers working on Cyberpunk 2077 now than there ever were on The Witcher III, though, which provides some hope that we wont be waiting too long to get a full reveal.

Meanwhile, Mike Pondsmith said that the project is shaping up exactly like he wanted to.

The vision is really pretty close to what I had in my head years ago. When did the CGI trailer, I looked at it and said, Oh my God, thats like perfect. And there were all these little touches from Cyberpunk in the background, because theyre fans. I said to me, They really did it! Thats awesome. So, the feeling has stayed the same and weve also been continually developing it to keep that feeling.

The game will also have multiplayer features. Whether that means drop in/drop out cooperative multiplayer, competitive multiplayer or maybe even an MMO-like game world is anyones guess at this point. Stay tuned on Wccftech for all the latest rumors and official updates on Cyberpunk 2077.

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Cyberpunk 2077 Will Have Journalist/Executive Classes, Mike ... - Wccftech

The last few days have seen massive online demonstrations in favor of net neutrality, the principle that internet service providers should treat all online traffic equally. But they've also sparked a bit of an existential crisis over on r/cyberpunk, the subreddit dedicated to the drizzly, grimy, neon-drenched genre dominated by technology and pioneered by books like William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

"You know, I feel like /r/cyberpunk should take a stand towards net neutrality," user MxP1nk wrote in a July 12 post, pointing out the subreddit's relative silence on the issue on a day when Reddit, alongside hundreds of the internet's most popular websites and millions of users, took a stand against the Trump Administration's plans to dismantle federal rules safeguarding net neutrality.

"The current situation with the FCC looking to repeal net neutrality should be talked about more, especially on a community like this where the internet and communication play such a big role," the user went on.

This sparked a lengthy and ongoing debate within the subreddit, which boasts nearly 140,000 subscribers. Is net neutrality a cyberpunk issue? And if so, what can be done about it?

Many responders to MxP1nk's post highlighted that, by nature of its very name, the cyberpunk community ought to fight against any plans to abolish net neutrality.

"Cyberpunk is more than neon lights, rainy streets and cybernetics, or the Punk part of it is supposed to be anyway," said Reddit user M0rtis86. "It's meant to be about opposing big business deciding on what you have access to. Something like ditching net neutrality really is taking a step to the dystopian side of things."

Others joked about how to actually get cyberpunks to care about the issue.

"You've exceeded the number of neon lights your plan allows you to view. Please upgrade your internet package to continue viewing neon lights," quipped snailboy.

But to truly live in the dystopian world where cyberpunk thrives, in fiction at least, wouldn't the big, web-throttling corporations have to win first? That way, the intrinsic purpose of punk would come alive and have something to fight against.

"We have one of the building blocks of a cyberpunk dystopia materializing before our eyes," wrote blookies. "I think net neutrality not only should be here, but belongs here."

Blookies explained how corporations pushing deregulation that only gives them more power over the "common folk" is a trope already firmly in place in cyberpunk settings.

Read more: After Net Neutrality 'Day of Action,' Internet Activists Face a Tough Fight Ahead

I asked MxP1nk whether they really believed net neutrality has a home in a cyberpunk universe.

"Net neutrality, in itself, is not a cyberpunk issue, let me say that first," MxP1nk wrote me via a Reddit private message. "However, the prospect of that being taken away from the people is very much so."

"Considering cyberpunk has many themes of freeing information or taking back rights or what have you, that have been taken by greedy mega corporations, I would think the prospect of losing net neutrality is totally cyberpunk," MxP1nk added. "Even if, realistically, I would not want it to happen."

Obviously, at the end of the day, the fight for net neutrality affects anyone who uses the internet. And while protesters this week hailed the massive day of action a success, the fight is an uphill battleone that will be fought alongside several other fictions-cum-realities we thought were firmly staying in the land of make-believe.

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Is Net Neutrality Cyberpunk? - Motherboard

By Robert Purchese Published 12/07/2017

"We had Communism and we had Cyberpunk."

Mike Pondsmith would hear those words 25 years after he'd joked about how few people would play a Polish translation of his American paper role-playing game Cyberpunk in a country behind the Iron Curtain. They would be the words spoken by a company offering him the deal of his life, and the words responsible for him signing it. Now nearly 30 years after Mike Pondsmith first published Cyberpunk, we're about to see the fruits of the seeds he once inadvertently sowed: Cyberpunk 2077.

With The Witcher series resting in the wings, CD Projekt Red is ready to bring this new collaboration centre stage, and as the spotlight of attention on Cyberpunk 2077 swivels closer, Mike Pondsmith is naturally caught in the glare. Who is this man behind the game CD Projekt Red's near future will be based on - and how is he helping shape it? I followed Mike Pondsmith to Spanish conference Gamelab to find out.

Face to face, Mike Pondsmith is a storyteller. You've seen him before in a video promoting Cyberpunk 2077, but he's embarrassed by it. It was four years ago and he isn't anywhere near as moody in real life. If anything he's sassy, relishing in a story's build up before dropping his head and looking over his pencil-narrow specs for the punchline. He's easy company and seems to know everything, as game designers do. "You need to read everything; you will use everything," he says. "You eat mozzarella, you eat dough, you eat tomatoes and you spit out pizza." He's got a million silly sayings like that.

He grew up a "service brat", always moving home with his US Air Force dad, spending time living in Germany as well as all round the States. It gave him an eclectic perspective, a never-ending string of teachers and influences, and who knows? Perhaps not a regular crowd of friends to entertain himself with. By 11 he'd discovered science fiction, and by 11 he'd also made his first game: a chess-like creation played on a rectangular board with raised squares representing different stages of hyperspace. The idea was to get your ships to the other side, dodging the enemy ships by dropping in and out of hyperspace.

He tells a memorable tale about his first run-ins with Dungeons & Dragons. "This was way the heck back," he begins. "One of the guys in our circle brought back a copy of the original Dungeons & Dragons and came back and we made characters and played, up all night. And we were loud with it.

"[My friend's] apartment was down in a fairly seedy part of Berkeley, and one of the nights we were making so much noise that one of the ladies of the evening actually came by to find out what we were doing and... she got into it! So we had this woman who, when she wasn't turning tricks, was basically playing our cleric."

He was into sci-fi, comics and war gaming but also played in bands. "I wasn't exactly a geek," he says, "because there weren't geeks then," and by university he was even positively "obnoxious", as his future wife would once describe him - he'd asked her friend out instead of her. "That was during my weird 'big man on campus days'," he explains, "when I was dating a lot of people and being, 'Hey, here I am!'"

To get another shot he'd have to pick up gaming again and join an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons group she was in. "And I got invited into a game that was currently being run by her old boyfriend," he says, "who proceeded to try, in every way possible, to kill my character!

"You've gotta understand, back then I had a big afro, I wore mirrorshades, a ratty army jacket, motorcycle boots and carried a six-inch knife - I'd been working in West Oakland which is a real rough neighbourhood. I did not look like the person you wanted to bother! And so there I am in his game and we'd all be on the wall somewhere, fighting some orcs, and he'd send a balrog after me."

But the balrog didn't work - do they ever? - and Mike and Lisa are now living happily ever after. But more importantly back then, Pondsmith was back in gaming, and back in gaming shops, where one afternoon he bumped into Traveller, a science fiction role-playing game. "I was stoked," he says. "I got it back and I whipped out my black books and I started working."

He was around 20 years old when he made what would become his first commercial game, Mekton, inspired by Japanese comic Mobile Suit Gundam. A game about big robots fighting each other. He used the type-setting machine at the University of California, where he was working, to make it, then took Mekton to a conference nearby to try it out. Six people played the first day but 40 people turned up the next, and they wanted to know when they could buy it. Pondsmith borrowed $500 from his mum in 1982 to start R. Talsorian Games and fulfil their wishes. "I was now a game designer whether I planned to be one or not."

The idea of Cyberpunk came to Pondsmith while crossing the San Francisco Bay Bridge at two o'clock in the morning roughly five years later. Blade Runner was his favourite film and he really loved how the city looked that night. "Hmm I wonder..." he thought.

He wanted to create a future - the first edition was set in 2013, jarringly - where society didn't work but access to technology and information allowed normal people to overcome the barriers and restrictions usually held in place by a powerful and influential elite. "And that access," he says, "is rebellious, it's dangerous, it takes risks."

Cyberpunk was the 1980s: the bottled excitement of where all the rapidly evolving technology - mobile phones and personal computers! - would lead, mixed with a blaring screech of punky nonconformity. A game of "big guns, rock and roll, drugs and craziness". "All the bad things you're supposed to not do in other role-playing games - not supposed to rob, not supposed to steal, not supposed to bust into buildings and say, 'Give me your cyberware and all your chips!' - you do that in Cyberpunk." He would give people "a wonderful opportunity to do bad things".

"I figured it would do well," he says, "but I didn't expect I would be riding a cultural wave. It sold just ridiculously. It was a life-changing release."

The success of Cyberpunk, released in 1988, moved R. Talsorian Games out of Pondsmith's house and into a proper office, and would dominate the company's output for years, producing numerous supplements as well as a second edition, Cyberpunk 2020, in 1990. A third edition would have arrived earlier than 2005, but was delayed when Pondsmith's self-described knack of predicting the future threw up a problem.

"I blew up the Arasaka twin towers in Night City with a nuclear weapon," he says. "I'd written it. I was sitting there, finishing off, doing a sequence where a full-body cyborg is running around - she's basically part of the recovery team getting bodies out of these gigantic buildings that have been blown up. I finish this, I walk out, and I look at the TV and I go: 'Is that a movie or something?'"

It was September 11th, 2001.

"This is too chilling," he thinks. "I'm watching the World Trade Center going, 'Not only am I horrified about this but I've just done this entire sequence, including the fire and rescue people going in, pulling people out of the building, the wreckage. I'm going, 'Oh no, no no - this is just ridiculous.' This is why Cyberpunk third was late."

But no amount of success and forecasting could keep the paper gaming market from crashing and burning in the late '90s, and Pondsmith, now with dozens and dozens of releases under his belt - including new series Castle Falkenstein - was forced to put Talsorian on ice and look for another job. "I had a kid to raise," he says.

Then the phone rang. "And Microsoft showed up out of leftfield and said, 'Hey you want a job?' And I went, 'I already have a job - I have a whole company.' And they went, 'Oh you can keep your company, that's fine.' And I went, 'Okay... How much are you paying me?' And they gave me a number and I went, 'That's more money than God.'"

His Microsoft job was running a concept team, coming up with ideas for big teams to move onto when their projects wrapped. He worked on games like Crimson Skies, Blood Wake (an Xbox launch title) and the Flight Sim series, and "oversaw a bunch of other teams that did things that never made the light of day". Microsoft even sent him to pitch a Matrix game idea to the Wachowskis, but despite bonding over a love of kung fu/wushu, and enjoying each other's company, he didn't get the gig.

He would go on to work on The Matrix Online at Monolith, though, "a very odd project I never quite figured out what was going on with, except that the directions kept changing". By the time The Matrix Online came out and sunk, Pondsmith was freelance and eyeing a teaching post at DigiPen Institute of Technolog in Redmond, Washington - and The Matrix Online remained, for a long time, the closest he came to making a Cyberpunk video game.

Then in 2012, in the midst of an R. Talsorian Games reformation, the phone rang again. It was a call from Poland, from The Witcher studio CD Projekt Red. "CDPR drop out of the sky and say, 'Hello we're a bunch of guys from Poland and we want to do Cyberpunk.'

"We're cracking up," he says. "When we did the licence my comment was, 'Well there will be six guys who play it in Polish,' and it turned out they were the people who did!"

He was sent The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings as a kind of convincer and, "holy crap", he thought it was great. But he was also sceptical. It wasn't the first time someone had asked to do a Cyberpunk video game. "It's been pretty much under licence since its inception," he says, and several major publishers had had a shot. The closest it came was contract negotiations "but the problem was they wanted to change almost everything involved" and so the negotiations fell apart.

He'd also seen Eastern European development studios during his several years at Microsoft, where he also worked as a studio sorter-outer - a fixer. "I had been to a lot of countries that had just come out from the Iron Curtain and worked with dev houses over there, so I figured CDPR was a bunch of guys in a little sweatshop somewhere," he says. "In one place in Hungary they produced beautiful stuff but it was literally a broom closet with 25 guys crammed over overheated monitors. That's what I expected."

Yet, intrigued, he took the offer of a trip to Poland - and his mind began to change. "I get over there and they set me up in this really nice hotel and give me this driver who looks like he should have been driving spies around. He was almost as wide as he was tall, had heavy accent like ziss, spoke very little English, wore a severe black suit and drove a Mercedes.

"'This is pretty posh for a bunch of guys working in a broom closet,'" he thought - but he was still preparing to let CD Projekt Red down. It wasn't until he got into the studio and cast his Microsoft-trained eye over tools, procedures and general set-up that he thought, "Wow. This works."

What impressed him most, however, was how much CD Projekt Red knew about Cyberpunk. "They knew more about a lot of the things we did in the original Cyberpunk game than anybody we'd ever talked to," he says. "There were points where I was going, 'I had forgotten that,' and I wrote the damn thing! I realised these guys are fans. They loved it because they had grown up playing it. Nobody had really looked at it from that standpoint before."

CD Projekt Red shrugged and explained: "We had Communism and we had Cyberpunk."

"And that," Pondsmith says, "sealed it for us."

When he struck his deal with CD Projekt Red, Mike Pondsmith had many advantages over the studio's other major licence partner Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, who openly bemoans his lot. Sapkowski had no faith in games and no faith CD Projekt Red would actually make one. A decade later, Pondsmith - who had plenty of faith in games already - could play The Witcher 2 and see development of The Witcher 3. He had also spent time working on intellectual property at Microsoft so he knew what kind of deal he wanted to cut. "Suffice to say we made a lot more money in this deal than Sapkowski," he tells me. "I don't want to retire but I could."

The deal took around six months to strike. "It was a longer process because we were thinking in terms of a series and a franchise," he says, "so we had to figure out 'how is this going to work five games from now?'"

The deal declares CD Projekt Red the rights to "Cyberpunk 2077-backed stuff until the end of time and hell freezes over" - and exclusively, from what I can tell. "The way we operate is we do everything up to the 2077 period and they do beyond. Part of that was to allow everyone a little room.

"When I write new stuff for Cyberpunk now, I talk to them so what I do in 2030 matches up with what's going to happen in 2077. It allows them the ability to move forward and I can still create new stuff as long as we stay coordinated."

For instance: "A couple of weeks ago I went over the current story script and was going through it, 'okay okay this is great this is great - oh by the way that person is dead'," he says. "We're constantly going back and forth, we work really hard on the timeline. We want people to have that sense that there's a coherent universe. They mesh together surprisingly well."

CD Projekt Red didn't realise Pondsmith had a decade in video games until a few meetings in. "That's when the deal shifted from being an IP deal to my being actually pretty involved," he says, and the collaboration began with getting the Cyberpunk feel and concepts in place.

"Most people tend to look at it as 'if it's grim it's Cyberpunk'," he says. "I really believe that there should be something that's kick out the jams, rocking it, raising hell - the rebellion part of it. That's what we've been aiming for, to get that feeling. I want people to feel like it's a dark future but there are points you can have fun in it."

Cyberpunk also has to be personal. "You don't save the world, you save yourself," he says. "That's a very important thing. You're usually not the hero, you're absolutely downtrodden, you're usually the people who are not going to be up top but access to technology, knowledge, and 'what the hell I'm going to do this' gets you through."

Concepts and feeling aside, there's just a sheer mountain of Cyberpunk data to get through, spanning three sourcebooks and numerous supplements with them. Cities are mapped right down to minutiae - use your own technology access to find scans of Cyberpunk sourcebooks and you'll see what I mean. The amount of data swamps what CD Projekt Red had to work with for The Witcher, and while it's a gift of a resource, laying all of it down takes time.

But time they've had. There's been a small team beavering away on Cyberpunk 2077 ever since the game was announced in 2012 - an announcement done to attract talent to the studio, which isn't something CD Projekt Red has to worry about now. When I visited CD Projekt Red in 2013, to learn the studio's history, there were roughly 50 people working on the game. I don't know how large the team grew after that because when I returned as a fly on the wall during The Witcher 3's launch, I wasn't allowed to see. This is because of CD Projekt Red's reinforced silence surrounding the game, a way of managing expectations in a post-Witcher 3 world. Simply, CD Projekt Red is not talking about Cyberpunk until it has something to show.

Since The Witcher 3 launched, Pondsmith says CD Projekt Red has grown. "The number of bodies there has at least doubled," he says, "and now they're pretty much all on Cyberpunk. It's an impressive ton of people. I remember one trip I met the entire team in Warsaw and then went to Krakow [CD Projekt Red's smaller, second studio, opened in 2013], met the team and then went back to Warsaw again. The team has grown tremendously."

Pondsmith visits three or four times a year, hand-delivering paperwork and data - to avoid any "disasters" like the recent Cyberpunk 2077 asset theft - and spending days in endless meetings with every team. One of the reasons he believes his paper Cyberpunk game was so successful was the "tremendous" amount of research poured into making it feel real. A ranger paramedic, who had put people back together in combat situations, advised on the damage system, and a trauma surgeon explained exactly what happened when you drilled into someone's head for an implant.

As for guns: there's nothing like firing the real thing. "I just bought some new hardware," Pondsmith happily tells me, but it's as much for his Talsorian team as for him. "You're not going to write about shooting guns without knowing how to shoot guns," he tells them. "You need to go down and find out because otherwise you're going to be talking about silly things like, 'Yeah I one-handedly picked a .357 [Magnum] and fired it.' Yeah, and you broke your wrist."

How many guns he owns he won't tell me, which makes me think he owns a lot. He's got a Broomhandle Mauser, the vintage gun Han Solo's Star Wars pistol is based on, and he's got an H&K MP5K, his favourite. "It's the shorty equivalent of the Uzi and it's a beautiful gun," he assures me. "When we go down to Vegas I go out and shoot them then because they're illegal as hell in most of the United States."

His son is also a fan of weaponry, albeit medieval, and owns several swords and bows. "The joke is that if someone broke into our house, the biggest pause would be everyone in the house deciding what they were going to kill them with, between the swords, the guns, the crossbows..." he laughs.

Pondsmith has cast his fastidious eye for authenticity over Cyberpunk 2077 development from the beginning. And it's that, coupled with the wisdom imparted from more than a decade of making games, which makes his contribution an entire world away from the snooty indifference Andrzej Sapkowski showed CD Projekt Red during Witcher development. And all the hard work is paying off.

"We saw some gameplay stuff when I was over there last time and I went, 'Yeah this feels like I'm doing a good Cyberpunk game here; I'm in the middle of a run I would have set up,'" he says. "It's pretty flashy I tell ya. We go, 'Yeah. Yeah. Yeah! You told me this is good - but this is really cool.'"

One unexpected off-shoot of the Cyberpunk 2077 collaboration is the Witcher 3 paper role-playing game, which wasn't part of the original deal but arose after yet another phone call. "We want to do a Witcher tabletop," said CD Projekt Red, "you know anyone?"

Pondsmith was busy and doesn't do fantasy, but staring him in the face was someone who did: his son Cody, who popped his head around the door and said, "I want to do Witcher."

"My son is actually a pretty damn good designer," Mike Pondsmith proudly tells me now. "I don't know that he was paying attention when the old man was doing stuff - I didn't know he was in my classes! - but at any rate he's got a knack for it.

"The first time I realised it we were on one of the trips over to Warsaw and he was bumming along with me and I look over and he's in a bar and he's talking to Damien [Monnier - former Witcher gameplay designer and Gwent co-creator], the systems guy - a really good systems guy - and he and Cody are sitting there going at it hammer and tongs on how to implement something. They're going at it," he says for emphasis. "I don't know where he learned it but he learned it. He looks at games the way I do: he will tear them apart."

Mike entertained Cody's idea but said if Cody wanted it, he had to go and get it. "You have to do the pitch, you have to put it together, you have to convince CDPR to let you do it, the whole nine yards."

Months later they travelled to Poland, Mike for Cyberpunk 2077 meetings, Cody to make his pitch. Mike was running here, there and everywhere, but every time he passed the cafeteria where Cody was pitching, he saw a different member of CD Projekt Red on the receiving end, nodding enthusiastically. This carried on until it was company co-founder Marcin Iwinski doing the nodding, which was a good sign and Cody got the gig. He has been immersed in Witcher lore ever since. He's even apparently heading off to Witcher School - I hope he is prepared!

The Witcher paper RPG was supposed to be released in the middle of 2016, but wasn't because CD Projekt Red couldn't spare anyone to look over it. "CDPR is pretty exacting making sure it's good," Mike Pondsmith says. It's written, though. "It's actually in editing now getting cleaned up."

It's funny to think what the future now holds for Mike Pondsmith, a man who plied a trade imagining it. Perhaps what he saw in Night City scared him, because there he was, nearly 60 years old, out of the public eye at his house hidden by forest, "raising hell" with his corgi Pikachu, when CD Projekt Red landed like a meteor in his life and put he and Cyberpunk squarely, unequivocally, back on the map. At 63 years old he may be about to become more famous than ever, and like a surfer surveying the sea, he's preparing for the wave. "We're sort of expecting things to lift off," he says.

"I was actually in the process of doing Cyberpunk Red when CD Projekt Red showed up," he tells me, so he will continue with that. He'll also "probably" do a 2077 version for pen and paper in addition to the Mekton Zero game he's way behind on. In other words he has no intention of slowing down. "Lisa says I'll retire when they pry the keyboard out of my dead hands," he says.

But first, of course, there's Cyberpunk 2077. When it will be out, we don't know - 'not before 2017' is all CD Projekt Red has ever said. My guess is 2019, but then what do I know?

"Think of me!" blurts Pondsmith. "I know a bunch of stuff and I can't tell anybody. Lisa and I are likening it to the first Indiana Jones movie years and years ago. We went to a midnight showing before it was a mass release. We're in there, it's this midnight showing at this rinky-dink little theatre in Davis, California, and we watch and we're two of 12 people in the theatre, and we walk out and we go, 'OH MY GOD!' We were frothing. And it's the same thing here."

"As Lisa likes to say: 'We backed the right horse.'"

Continued here:

Making Cyberpunk: when Mike Pondsmith met CD Projekt Red - Eurogamer.net

Estimated Release Date: when it's ready

TEMPORARY SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

As the title is still in pre-development/concept stages and it is likely there will be little to no news for extended periods, for the time being any and all cyberpunk-related content will be regarded as suitable material for submission, in the hope of establishing a community by the time the title is released. It is likely that these submission guidelines will be narrowed to restrict submissions to game related content as the release date approaches, depending on the growth and development of the subreddit as a whole, but in the meantime readers are encouraged to submit anything cyberpunk related.

Would you like to know more?

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PRESS RELEASE

CD Projekt RED's Upcoming Futuristic RPG Is "Cyberpunk 2077"

Warsaw, 18 October 2012 CD Projekt RED has officially announced the title of its in-development role-playing game. "Cyberpunk 2077" will be set in the world created by Mike Pondsmith, one of the fathers of the cyberpunk genre and the creator of the cult-classic pen-and-paper RPG, Cyberpunk.

"The Team has to love the material. The Team has to want to be faithful to the material. The Team has to have the skills to execute the material and see that vision through to the end. They have to be on fire with the desire to make an extraordinary game.

And that leads, at last, to why we hooked up with CD Projekt RED" Mike Pondsmith commented, why he has chosen to work with the Polish game developer.

The cyberpunk atmosphere, well known from William Gibson's novels, the "Blade Runner" movie and the famous pen-and-paper game, "Cyberpunk 2020", will surround the player. The creators promise that "Cyberpunk 2077" will be true to the essence of the cyberpunk genre. Players will be thrown into the dark future of the year 2077 and into a world where advanced technologies have become both the salvation and the curse of humanity. A multi-thread, nonlinear story designed for mature players (a CD Projekt RED trademark) will take place in the sprawling metropolis of Night City and its surroundings. Players will have a chance to visit places well known from "Cyberpunk 2020", including a combat zone completely taken over by gangs, the legendary Afterlife joint and the nostalgic Forlorn Hope.

Freedom of action and diversity in gameplay will be delivered thanks to the sandbox nature of the game and mechanics inspired by the "Cyberpunk 2020" pen-and-paper system, fine tuned to meet the requirements of a modern RPG. Gameplay will pump adrenaline through players' veins and be consistent with the celebrated Cyberpunk spirit rebellion, style, edge, uncertainty. And of course, a cyberpunk reality cannot be deprived of murderous steel guns, rifles, implants, dozens of gadgets and other varied pieces of equipment needed to survive on the streets of Night City. The developers are focused on making the technology of 2077 credible and exciting.

For more info please visit the newly launched blog: cyberpunk.net and read some articles written by both the developers from CD Projekt RED and Mike Pondsmith himself.

See the rest here:

Cyberpunk 2077 - reddit

Game Review

Release Date: MS-DOS, Mac OS, WW: October 31, 1995

Windows, WW: September 5, 2013

OS X, Linux, WW October 17, 2013

iOS, Android, WW: January 14, 2016

Developer: Cyberdreams

Producers: David Mullich, Robert Wiggins

Platform: Android, MS-DOS, Mac OS, Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS

Genre: Horror and adventure

Degree of Cyberpunk Visuals:

Degree of Cyberpunk Themes:

Rating:8/10

If you love dark and horror fantasy, then there is no doubt that you will absolutely love this game.

Overview: This is a story that makes you believe that fate is worse than death. I recommend you read the short collection first before you play the game because there are several horrifying scenes that will either make you want to play the game or haunt you to bed.

The Story: The plot of the video game revolves in America, Russia, and China creating a subterranean complex of high technology. It is too difficult for humans to understand. The supercomputer soon started killing people but left one woman and four men. They are the only ones left on Earth to be tortured. However, through the research of the AM, these five survivors will find ways in order to defeat the opponent.

Just imagine yourself as an immortal and being tortured by AM because you are one of the chosen playthings. Ellen is the only woman in the story, a 2-dimensional character had been turned into a sexual slave and was used by the four men in the group. One of the guys, Benny, who was a gay in the earlier part of the story had turned straight again but he was transformed into a mutant with a suspiciously large penis. Gorrister and Nimdok are the other guys of the chosen playthings of the story.

As you play this game, you will eventually answer the question, Why did he choose these five individuals? AM will soon challenge these five characters into playing a game, playing with their biggest fears and meddling with their own flaws. However, you know too well that even if he promised that he will set them free once they win the game, he will never do anything he promised.

If youre thinking of the Saw body-horror games, then you are wrong. For instance, one of the guys, Gorrister is suicidal. His wife was killed a hundred years ago. He found himself in a seppelin and was now provided with all the ways to commit suicide. However, he received help from a talking jackal which made him surpassed the game.

However, this game wasnt made to be completed by anyone. By the time every character had been able to complete each of their games, they are lifted into a new level where they discover that AM cannot be defeated. If they win the game, they will only be turned into a blob monsterwhich sucks after hours spent in order to win the game. The end of the story is simplehumanity is completely wiped out. Thats it.

Link:

CyberPunkReview - The latest news and reviews from the Cyber ...

The original Deus Ex is a classic, one that I spent several hours with as a younger gamer, but it hasnt aged that well. Enter GMDX (Give Me Deus Ex, of course) a mod for the original Deus Ex that aims to give the game a glorious HD update with a bushel of additional tweaks, such as changes to the UI, graphics, AI and other augments that would give even protagonist JC Denton a run for his money.

Though the mod itself has been around for about four years, its recently welcomed its latest iteration in the form of GMDX 9.0, which is available now for you to download.

The latest version of the GMDX mod, GMDX 9.0, includes advanced artificial intelligence, new effects, animations, graphics and more. The team behind the mod has also worked to improve the games physics engine, RPG systems, weapons and more. There are even changes to difficulty settings, if thats something youre interested in seeing altered.

GMDX states that the entire point of the mod is to enhance the player experience wherever possible and not to change the fundamental core of Deus Ex, but rather to dig deeper and more fully achieve and build upon the creative vision from the Deus Ex team. From the look of things, the people behind GMDX 9.0 are doing just that.

As you can see in the three-minute long release trailer, its almost as if Deus Ex were a game released in the past couple of years or so. And if youve only ever played games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution or the other, newer iterations, youre missing out. Whether youre a Deus Ex newbie or are looking to rediscover the classic game, youll want in on this free mod, which you can download here.

Check out the latest from Mic, like this essay about the sinister, subtle evils lurking in rural America that Far Cry 5 shouldnt ignore. Also, be sure to read our review of Tekken 7, an article about D.Vas influence on one Overwatch players ideas about femininity and an analysis of gamings racist habit of darkening villains skin tones.

Original post:

'Deus Ex' Mods: GMDX 9.0 release brings the cyberpunk classic into ... - Mic

Mexican developer Mecha Studios has launched a crowdfunding campaign for Neon City Riders, a futuristic game full of punks, superpowers and warring gangs.

Its a rough world out there, but Neon City is particularly rough. Theres a vicious street gang in every direction, and gang warfare is a daily reality. All of thats about to change when the protagonist of Neon City Riders enters the scene.

The mask-wearing Rick might look more like a baddie or a serial killer (and well, the latter might not be entirely untrue), but he has ambitious plans: hes going to free the people trapped in gangland turfs and unite them under one banner. So like a cyberpunk Nobunaga, of sorts?

Now up on Kickstarter, Neon City Riders throws you into an open world and lets you explore it freely, kind of like the 2D Zelda games, but with Metroidvania exploration. In your quest to break down the gangs, youll hunt for items and superpowers while building up your own gang. You can even chat with your fellow gang members, an ability that reminds me of the Saints Row games.

Combat is fast-paced, and involves using your abilities and the environment in tandem. Theres a wide range of enemies, and each gang has its own superhuman powers. They look kind of cool, actually? A cyberpunk gangland overrun by Vanilla Ice impersonators, BDSM fetishists, actual walking crocodiles and Native American robots is one I want a look at.

Neon City Riders is in development for PC, Mac and Linux. Depending on whether or not the campaign reaches the stretch goal, it will also release on PS4.

Want to unite people in a Zelda-inspired game but by less violent means? Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles lets you do this. If the idea of running around violently in a cyberpunk city does enthuse you though, have a look at Tokyo 42.

Independent DevelopmentIndie GamesIndiesKickstarterMecha StudiosNeon City Riders

The rest is here:

Beat cyberpunk gangs to free turfs in Neon City Riders, now on Kickstarter - IND13

The below remake of The Last Jedi trailer is certainly interesting, in part, because of how it was produced, using an Apple IIc from 1984, a program from the era called Dazzle Draw, and some 48 floppy disks, the entirety of which contained 6 MB of information. But the method is a little less important than the end result, which is completely, stupidly cool, like youre seeing through the code from The Matrix to visualize the Magic Eye-like images buried underneath it.

According to TechCrunch, Twitter user @pinotski produced the video over the course of three weeks, apparently while holding up transparent plastic sheets against the monitor. That sounds like a lot of work, but the end result is worth it. This probably goes without being said, but maybe someone could do this for the entire prequel trilogy? Just a thought.

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Original post:

The Last Jedi trailer gets a cyberpunk-as-hell remake - A.V. Club