Cyberpunk 2020?

A lot of folk are aware there’s a big video game release in the pipe for later this year produced by CD Projekt Red, the same people behind the acclaimed game adaptations of The Witcher. Mind you the very latest news is that Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed until September, but it’s still on track for 2020. This is important, if you pay any mind to the arbitrary numbers we assign to our Earth’s revolutions around its sun.

Why? Well, the property was originally a tabletop role-playing game released in 1988 and called Cyberpunk 2020, depicting a polluted, dystopian future world where multinational corporations ruled, the lines between the haves and have-nots were stark, and “cyberpunks” moved between the cracks of society, using their wits and gadgets to evade a pervasive, invasive information state seeking to catalog and control their every move.

Technically speaking, now that I’m refreshing my memories, the 1988 first edition was Cyberpunk 2013 and it’s the more well-known (well-known to old nerds, anyhow) 2nd edition published in 1990 that was Cyberpunk 2020. But I suppose the point is, when updating the property they couldn’t still call it Cyberpunk 2020 anymore because that future is now.

I mean I’m not even talking the multinational corporations and class warfare, we’re getting the first salvos of that technological gizmo arms race.

If you don’t have time or inclination to follow that link, I’ll just mention a couple of things. One, you can now buy “Reflectacles” for your eyewear, and that name and their description sound like something straight off an RPG sourcebook equipment list: “…made of a material that reflects the infrared light found in surveillance cameras…”

In other words, all that facial recognition software people are increasingly worried about?

Or how about a clothing line that makes apparel printed with fake or out-of-use license plate imagery that can throw traffic cameras for a loop by drowning them in false data? Adversarial Fashion has you covered, and again seems like the kind of thing that would have been a darkly absurd Phillip K. Dick dream until recent years.

No doubt the makers and users of the surveillance equipment will react to this eventually. Then the fringe will react to the reaction, and so on and so forth. I mean, as Rosa and Chuck are currently in the process of trying to defeat unwanted surveillance of their own, these things are close to my wheelhouse, but I don’t think I’m too far-fetched in surmising that (jacking your brain directly into the ‘Net aside) the Cyberpunks have arrived.