The Future
Obsessed with ‘Cyberpunk 2077’? Here are 22 fantastic cyberpunk things to play, watch, read, and hear
Find a way to pass the excruciating amount of time until the game’s release.
By Joshua Topolsky
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Gesaffelstein
‘Pursuit’
Is this the most cyberpunk music video of all time?
\nDid you know people were hacking together cyberdecks from old and new computer components? They are. And they are fucking awesome.
Long before Hideo Kojima created Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, there was Snatcher. The game, first released for the MSX system in 1988, and later given a killer update on the PC-Engine, Sega CD, and PlayStation, is probably one of the most fun but also most derivative cyberpunk titles ever created. Yes, there are replicants, and a guy who looks like Sting from Dune, and a club called Outer Heaven. And it is all fucking rad. Play it online right now.
\nFollow these accounts immediately for a daily dose of cyberpunk art.
\nYou may not have heard of Mondo 2000, but it was the proto-Wired, and for many, the cyberpunk bible of the early ‘90s. The magazine published a collection of essays that to this day still feels relevant, edgy, and way ahead of the curve. They also produced this totally outrageous image...
\nKathryn Bigelow’s 1995 film asks some relatively interesting new questions in cyberpunk (especially at the dawn of the internet age): what happens when we can share our most private moments, and what happens when those moments find their way into the wrong hands? As with Wild Palms and later Minority Report, at the core of these stories are people trying to hold onto something that makes us uniquely human: the ways that we remember what we’ve lost.
\nWarren Ellis’s seminal comic book chronicles the trials and tribulations of Spider Jerusalem, gonzo journalist of the 23rd century. Rarely has a world been so richly envisioned and beautifully shown, and almost nowhere in comics is there a more challenging, cerebral, and timely tale.
\nGerman director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s revolutionary TV miniseries isn’t exactly pure cyberpunk, though the themes it explores, the paranoid universe its characters exist within, and the mind-bending twist that unravels its protagonist are spiritually in sync with the best of cyberpunk fiction that would follow. Watch it right now.
\nReleased in 1989, Shinya Tsukamoto’s stark, frantic, often sardonically funny art film makes David Cronenberg’s body horror output look like Disney films by comparison. Essentially the tale of an average Japanese “salaryman” who finds himself mutating into a half-machine monster, the visually polarizing movie is at turns disgusting, hilarious, and just plain confusing. Extra points for ending the film with GAME OVER as opposed to THE END. Watch it right now.
\nPart cartoon and part nightmare, 1993’s The Lawnmower Man envisions a world where our technology reaches beyond our control, and our understanding. Oh, and there’s really cool VR rigs all over the film. Come for the excellent and campy performances by Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey, stay for the totally ‘90s psychedelic 3D graphics.
\nEveryone talks about how Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as the kind of ultimate expression and in some way logical conclusion of cyberpunk writing, but The Diamond Age is — in my estimation — covertly more cyberpunk, more thought-provoking, and downright weirder. Both are awesome books you should have already read.
\nFor immersive, captivating storytelling and extremely cyberpunk themes, it doesn’t get any better than Eidos’s 2012 entrant in the Deus Ex series, Human Revolution. If you love Metal Gear but always felt it wasn’t dystopic enough, this is your game. The sequel, Mankind Divided is good as well, but the original’s plot shouldn't be missed.
\nThis is a no-brainer, but must be noted. The Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) really are the high-water mark for cyberpunk novels. There was never a world more detailed, more human, and more tangible than the ones Gibson presented in this series. He really was the first author able to fully extrapolate a new world that was a true extension of the one we were living in. In many ways, the books remain both wildly ahead of the curve and strangely, sadly prescient.
\nThere are a million entrants to the cyberpunk canon from the world of anime, but few stand out as forward looking — or as beautiful — as Masamune Shirow’s Ghost in the Shell. Based on the 1989 manga, the film version of the story plays out like a 2D opera, with characters, technology, and a world rich enough that you feel drowned in it. Avoid the live-action version at all costs.
\nReleased the same year as Neuromancer, Ridley Scott’s perfectly horrible vision of the future is a film that no list of cyberpunk works is complete without. If Gibson was the one who wrote it down, Scott was the one who put it up on the screen. Whatever was in the water at that moment, it defined the nature of cyberpunk fiction for decades. And fine... the sequel isn’t bad either.
\nOkay now admittedly this record is kind of a joke — but it is a testament to just how widespread cyberpunk culture became in the mid-‘90s. Idol’s foray into the world of 1337 hackers — produced in his home studio on a Mac, which was rare at the time — is heavy handed, cringe-inducing, and contains one of the worst covers of Heroin ever produced. But hey, the CD came with a floppy disk so… that’s pretty cyber. Make sure to check out his Video Toaster performance on The Tonight Show too.
\nENJOY...
The Future
Find a way to pass the excruciating amount of time until the game’s release.
By Joshua Topolsky