Cyberpunk

No matter how you put it, 2020 was the year of capital Cs. Rewind just a bit, and everyone in the video game community was looking forward to the long-overdue release of Cyberpunk 2077. Hell, “looking forward” is an understatement.

Before rising to prominence with Metal Gear Solid in 1998, game designer Hideo Kojima was involved in multiple noteworthy projects. Snatcher has garnered cult status, being revered as one of the greatest cyberpunk games of all time. But does it truly live up to its status?

Welcome to CyberPunks.com, where we sold your data for cold hard cash and performed behavioral experiments on you to increase our earnings. Just kidding. We’re not technical enough to get up to those kind of underhanded shenanigans; we left that to our internet advertising partners.

In a genre severely lacking in culinary options, ramen feels like the only food universally agreed to be tied to cyberpunk. At first, this association might appear inevitable because of the genre’s infatuation with the Far East, especially Japan. But could this association run even deeper, to the point that we can find the ingredients of cyberpunk all hidden inside one packet of instant ramen?

This year there’s been a lot of hype around the cyberpunk genre, mainly because of the highly anticipated release of CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077. With all the time in the world thanks to the pandemic lockdown, I thought it was a good time to jump into one of the cyberpunk’s earliest and most beloved novels, Neuromancer by William Gibson. 

So The Matrix 4 is confirmed. But what will it look like? There are so many questions! Have no fear! We’ll be reviewing how The Matrix Revolutions ended with Neo (Keanu Reeves), Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss), and The Oracle (Mary Alice) in the very last scene. Afterwards, we’ll share some hopes and predictions as to where this story may go into The Matrix 4.

It is a fundamental premise that, even in the grittiest of cyberpunk futures, there’s always a way of keeping poor people alive and docile. Preventing starvation effectively wards off riots, bloodshed and people shouting ‘Eat the Rich’ as more than just a tongue-in-cheek, anarchist catchphrase. Flavored protein paste is the answer.

Burial is an artist capturing withering urban decay. It’s wounded, electronic post-industrial, and even post-modern, eschewing the system of dopamine hitting drops and fist-pounding exhilaration. Although a forebear of dubstep, the secretive South Londoner would never perform on a stage.

Seraphine, a new “virtual influencer” and League of Legends character, seems like it could be based on someone else’s likeness. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a cartoonified version of yourself splashed all over the internet. It’s not a photograph, but it’s close enough that even your mother would take another glance and ask if you’ve taken a second job as a model.

Count Zero is the sequel which many thought would not come. Gibson himself admitted he had no plans to return to the world of the Sprawl; the closing sentence of Neuromancer was intended to be a severing of ties. As iconic as Neuromancer is, Count Zero exhibits the maturing of Gibson’s worldbuilding and even that of the cyberpunk genre itself.