MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Cyberpunk has explored the combination of technological achievements – most often cybernetics and artificial intelligence (AI) – on society, noting how different socioeconomic strata are impacted by the availability (and cost) of these technologies. Creators working in cyberpunk have imagined futures where subcultures of hackers, punks, and drugs create realities where data becomes the most precious commodity one can control. Reading a cyberpunk text such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) on a tablet, networked to the ocean of information users continually upload to the internet, manifests the speculations that early writers proposed about information, our relationship to it, and the way that new technologies impacts those associations. Most cyberpunk scholars point to Neuromancer as the text that helped solidify the genre, and the 1980s became the formative era for cyberpunk. In addition to Gibson, other writers such as Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker popularized the genre, and in terms of cinema, Blade Runner (1982) and Akira (1988) helped bring a visual interpretation. It would seem that the fit of cyberpunk and video games would almost naturally go hand in hand, but during the 1980s only a few titles were released that utilized the conventions of the genre to inform their game design. Beginning with The Screamer (1985), a small handful of games were slowly released over the following three decades, and while the overall number of titles were minuscule compared to the total number of video games released, the cyberpunk titles were often noted for the innovation and among video game critics and scholars have been identified as some of the most profoundly influential, including Shadowrun (1993), System Shock (1994), and Deus Ex (2000). This article traces the development of cyberpunk video games and their sometimes self-reflexive use of developing computer technologies to create more immersive video game experiences