Whatever Happened to Cyberpunk? July 12, 2010

The following is an editorial I wrote last summer (which feels basically the same as this summer) and posted up on another website.  For some reason, I decided to wipe the dust off my copy of Too Human, which I got as a Christmas gift two years ago and started playing it.  The obvious cyberpunk themes made me decide to reprint this editorial here.

I’ve spent this summer with way too much free time on my hands. When I’m not pretending to work, sleeping, or spending a short time on vacation I’ve actually become obsessed, thanks to The Spoony One, with really bad FMV games from the mid to late 90s. You know, those games we’re trying to forget and in most cases don’t run anymore?

I actually missed out on the cyberpunk generation of the computing world. I entered real computing around the era of the dawn of Windows 95 (which was in late 96) back when the next era in gaming was just starting, and it was called “Quake”. So there was a lot I missed out on. DOS in particular, and a lot of really bad FMV games I just never played. The ones I have played were few and far between, I particularly remember were ones after FMV was on it’s way out, including X-Files Game and Star Trek Borg. I’ve actually been told those were considered actually the high marking ones of the whole genre! John de Lancie’s performance made Star Trek Borg a cult classic in some respects, and despite the terrible and unintuitive gameplay of the X-Files Game, it had high production values and good acting, even by it’s unknown lead actor.

Back when I was in high school I read a classic book written by William Gibson called Neuromancer. This book depicted a future where we’d plug our brains into the net in order to surf it. That hackers were celebrities living on the fringe of society and actually were considered attractive to female mercenaries in skin-tight leather plagued by inner tragedy. By the late nineties and into the new millenium we’ve seemed to have forgotten this aspect of our society. Computers instead of becoming rogue have become commonplace, even used by the most low brained of us to send nude pictures to their idiot significant others. It was more than just a genre, it was a way of life. Something for all of us that were into computers to look forward to for the future.

So two of these FMV games that Spoony mentioned were made at the height of the genre when it crossed over the cyberpunk reality. One was Johnny Mnemonic, not the really bad Keanu Reeves movie, this was actually the FMV game which officially while based on the movie, was actually more based off the short story, and did a better job of translating the artistic style of cyberpunk across a visual medium than that badly acted poorly directed piece of film did. Johnny Mnemonic (The Interactive Movie) intrigued me when I saw Spoony’s review. The atmosphere actually wreaked of style, the actors did a better job of making their dialog convincing because unlike the big named actors in the film, they actually had to work for their paychecks. For example, I always hated in the film how the viewer was informed Johnny’s storage capacity could not be exceeded and what would happen if it was. One of the guys who was not Johnny actually informed Johnny himself of Johnny’s own limitations. And then Johnny played it like an “uh, duh!” moment! Stupid. In the game, Johnny himself informs Jane, someone who logically wouldn’t have a clue what was going to happen to him, and also at the same time informing the player. It doesn’t come off as stupid, it actually comes off as well placed exposition! I also think that everyone down the line actually did a better job in their respective roles, with the exception I can never knock Udo Kier in any performance he does, so I have to give Udo the one exception, his video game counterpart actor was not as good, but defiantly had better more logical dialog. I even liked Issac Hayes better as J-bone, his whole discussion about unplugging from technology fit perfectly into his scientology believes, and while I don’t agree with them (I’m a proud atheist), IT GAVE IT A DEEPER LAYER TO HIS PERFORMANCE! When you watched Ice-T in the film performance, you were literally watching Ice-T being Ice-T. It didn’t work.

I also got exposed to another technological cyberpunk game recommended by Spoony called Ripper, a FMV murder mystery set in a cyberpunk era future where a copycat Jack the Ripper is somehow killing people from inside the computer networks. The performances of all the actors were phenomenal, particularly Christopher Walken, Karen Allen, and my favorite of the game David Patrick Kelly. I also thought that Jimmy Walker, Burgess Meredith and John Rhys-Davies also did phenomenal jobs but their roles were smaller. The deeper you went in the game the deeper the story got, the murderer changing with every piece of evidence that came out. But it also came up with this whole back story between the three leads (who were also the game’s three main suspects, the murderer changes from playthrough to playthrough, so if I said who it was, it might not be valid to another player’s playthrough) that they formed an organization called the Web Runners when they were all together at the University. They exchanged their secret location through codes hidden in the interactive campus post boards, and composed of some of the best and brightest young hackers and gamers of their time. Basically they were the pioneers of the virtual gaming movement as teenagers. A movement that has not happened yet, and should.

I think the cyberpunk era ended in video games after Deus Ex, released in 2000, created by Warren Spector.  Sure they released a sequel to the game a few years later, and a third game is in development to be released on current hardware, but one game being released in an empty market every few years does not equal the return of a genre which really used to own the market.

I’ve been told by a lot of film buffs that the culmination of cyberpunk on a film medium was “The Matrix”.  I would agree with this.  The movie borrowed heavily from cyberpunk themes, people hacking computers with their brains, and the hovercraft had so much technology being strewn about like garbage.  Obviously after the bombs the two Matrix sequels were, I think Hollywood swore off cyberpunk, because I can think of many people who left those movies with a bad taste in their mouths for the subject matter.  I haven’t seen a cyberpunk film since.

I really miss this genre, I hope some day I can make my own impact on it (in print form of course).  Based upon the awful sales of Too Human (ironically enough a game originally conceived in 1999, at the peak of cyberpunk) and the probable cancellation of the other games in that series I think game developers are probably going to stick to a never-ending cycle of realistic war games.