Cyberpunk—the genre, not just the video game—is back. Altered Carbon and Westworld were hits, there’s a new Matrix movie in the works, and Cyberpunk 2077 is poised to be the year’s most successful, and most hyped, video game. For Mike Pondsmith, one of the genre’s founding fathers, it all makes perfect sense. In the world of cyberpunk, technology has the ability to create miracles, people are struggling for power, the future is uncertain, and corporations have the power of gods.
Sound familiar? “We have a more cyberpunk world than ever before,” Pondsmith says. “Things have fallen apart. The upshot is that we have greater levels of uncertainty and more things are in play.”
Pondsmith doesn’t remember the first time he heard the word cyberpunk. Back in the mid-1980s, when Pondsmith was working on the tabletop RPG that would inspire Cyberpunk 2077, he was just trying…
