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Cyberpunk Anticipated the High-Tech Assault on Democracy We’re All Living Through
If only we’d have listened 30 years ago
Up until last month, I’d not “seriously” played any video games for nearly a decade. I’d quit after a frustrating career as a producer in the console games industry left me exhausted by the precariousness and working conditions, which in turn had tainted the whole hobby for me. I still kept half an eye on news and trends because as a tech-cultural phenomenon, it fascinated me, but gaming had started to feel like a relic of a past life, something I’d left behind. And then 2020 happened. Like many, I found myself looking for activities that let me turn off parts of my brain during the pandemic lockdowns — something that wasn’t staring in despair at rolling TV news and Twitter or the kind of intensely serious reading and research that is such a vital part of my job. Suddenly gaming looked attractive again. And one game in particular: CD Projekt Red’s long-awaited Cyberpunk 2077.
So that’s what I was playing as I watched a mob of fanatics dressed like they were cosplaying as video game mercenaries assault the Capitol this month. The insurrection disturbed and affected me as it did most people, but after playing 2020’s biggest video game release — one where angry veterans and weapon-fetishizing fanatics run amok in the hyper-capitalist remains of a collapsed America — it also felt like a depressing case study of how we got here and how we failed to stop it.
I’d been aware of Cyberpunk 2077 since it was announced back in 2012 because as a teenager, I was obsessed with the pen-and-paper role-playing game it was based on. Cyberpunk 2013 was first published by R. Talsorian Games in 1988 with a second, more polished edition — Cyberpunk 2020 — out in 1990. It came just at the end of the decade, when cyberpunk books and movies like Neuromancer, Islands in the Net, Blade Runner, and Robocop had proven the genre was an important cultural phenomenon. Putting the years when it was set — 2013 and 2020 — in the titles of the editions seemed like a bold decision; at the time, cyberpunk authors had often been reluctant to put exact dates to their stories, wary that their very-near-future tales would seem dated too soon. But Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith was made of sterner stuff, and…
