Always been interested in this genre and wonder how you all feel about it.
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a future setting that tends to focus on society as "high tech low life" featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as information technology and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.
Some examples: Movie: Blade Runner
Book: Neuromancer by William Gibson Video Game: Deus Ex
High tech, low society or culture.
What do think of the Cyberpunk genre in movies, games and such?
It is largely dormant as a genre, not least of all because we are now in the early stages of it (when most cyberpunk stuff was written, it was all fantasy - even when Deus Ex came out) and so it isn't seen so much as fanciful as inevitable.
Don't get me wrong, I love the whole idea of giant megacities and cybernetic augmentations and everything that is involved, but it seems less relevant now, now that we already have people addicted to electronic devices, albeit ones that don't hook directly into their head via a Schreiberman Port.
Syndicate was my favourite cyberpunky thing - cyborg super-agents waging the corporate wars across city streets while vestigial governments watch helpelessly. It very much fed into the 'dying earth' from one of those Usborne Books Of The Future told me about as a kid - a heavily polluted planet kept habitable by technology as a mass exodus becomes economically viable. In a way, I suppose, it's a part of history that the lore of many spacefaring games largely skip over. They talk of a period of turmoil on Earth in the 21st and 22nd centuries but that is always overshadowed by the development of FTL drives and humanity finally freed from petty battles of the scraps remaining on Earth in favour of the riches of the cosmos.
I liked playing Deus ex human revolution, I don't think Perfect Dark counts as "Cyberpunk" but the dystopian future setting was pretty great, not to mention Elvis the Alien😎. I don't like how Cd projekt RED the creators of the game in the first picture were allowed to trademark the term Cyberpunk, it's ludicrous the term is older than their game.
Some of it is ok, but some is kinda corny. This movie may not be in the genre but what comes to my mind is the Mario bros movie, made in the 80's. Love it! Lol Most of the people I know think it's stupid.
Because cyberpunk was a genre created at the point when they thought the stuff we take for granted now was sci-fi stuff, Iphones, AIs stuff like that didn't exist back then. And once a genre is established you have to stick with it.
Besides it's supposed to have that older society feel to it while still feeling and looking futuristic and similar.
William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984 (when word processors were pretty new), on an old typewriter directly onto paper. I saw a program where some young people had to put together a newspaper using 80's technology; the lack of a 1 or 0 on the mechanical typewriters threw them a bit (you used l and O). Back then, a mouse was futuristic!
I love them, but the dystopian "near future" they describe is getting a bit too close for comfort. Information is already a trade-able commodity and no-one can stop corporations doing what they want, including killing people.
I personally like it, it's different and not something you actually see all that much of as a genre compared to other genres, personally when it's done right it's really good.
It is a lot of fun to see and explore cyber punk worlds. the scary thing is as technology gets more advanced, our culture and ability to function in the world deteriorates. In time we will be a cyber punk world.
Neuromancer was pretty good, so was ghost in the shell... Not a *huge* fan of blade runner though... it seemed like they had a great concept and all the other ingredients, but it just didn't do it for me...
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