Cyberpunk is my favorite genre of sci-fi, and I definitely found it via movies and TV, so I’m wondering what everyone’s favorite pieces of media out there?
Some of my tops are of course the classics like Blade Runner, Akira, Robocop, and Dredd
I think one of the earliest reasons I fell in love with Cyberpunk was Batman Beyond. That theme song also totally deeply influenced my music taste.
What about yall?
For me it was Ghost in the Shell and Shadowrun, which was the first pen & paper RPG I played when I was in college. I always played a rigger because that was the first time that I ever thought about “hacking” something other than a computer or network as a lifestyle. Combining the cultures of “petrol heads” and “tech nerds” clicked with me.
But the first “cyberpunk” movie that made the idea of technology as a sub-culture real to me was, ironically, (and I hate to admit this) seeing “Hackers” for the first time. Certainly not as a real vision of what “cyberpunk” was, but rather an extremely over-the-top and glamorized commentary both on how non-technical people view technophiles as well as how people who ate, slept, lived, and breathed a tech-centered ethos might live. Like, my parents legit believed that’s how I acted with my friends when I wasn’t around them.
I grew up in the era of The Legion of Doom and the Cult of the Dead Cow, and realized that this hyperbolic version of the archetypical “console cowboys” was how a lot of people saw the younger generation of computer kids. They had graduated from the long-haired, bearded, ex-hippies toiling away in a basement somewhere into stylish (albeit very weird) tech-savvy young hacktivists that were trying to buck the system solely because someone told them they couldn’t.
Then, reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash introduced the idea of a virtual world parallel (beneath? alongside?) to the physical world and that was the gravity that brought it all together.
1995’s Hackers is by far my fav '90’s movie. I just adore it. The casting, the opening sequence with Halcyon and On and On playing, one of the world’s first glimpses of the Wipeout video game, Angelina Jolie. I even have the novelisation of that movie. Penn from Penn and Teller who was a hacker in his own right: a regular contributor to a computer magazine
It is a yearly watch for me!
Hack the planet!
I think mine would have to be between Cyberpunk 2077 the game, the Edgerunners anime (honestly I take them both together as one) and Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex. Gods, SAC was so good.
Of course, all of the other works mentioned in the OP and in the thread are great too, but I think these are my favorites.
Stand Alone Complex is one of my favorite animes of all time. One of the few I’ve watched more than once, i rewatch once a year or two. Tachikomas are so great man.
I still need to watch Stand Alone Complex, cause I loved Gits.
I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the ‘cyber’ part then the ‘punk’ part.
Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of “what it means to be human”, which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov’s Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.
That’s why, out of all visual media, it’s really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It’s the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That’s probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?
To be fair to Blade Runner here, I don’t think it was really made to be “Cyberpunk”. It has some of the themes and inspired a lot of future Cyberpunk work (at the very least aesthetic wise), but the book “Cyberpunk” wasn’t published until a year later and “Neuromancer” didn’t come out until two years later, so a lot of the themes that we consider Cyberpunk weren’t fully realised yet. I guess you could argue it’s more proto-Cyberpunk (and a number of other sci-fi from before then), but it’s pretty firmly entrenched as Cyberpunk now, and to be honest, I don’t really disagree either. Strict definitions for genres are pretty tricky, even more so for foundational work like I’d say Blade Runner was.
Blade Runner hits those themes, but it pushes the discussion around Replicants, which are stand-ins for The Others in society. Those movies don’t hit the POV of street level, which is different than most cyberpunk works.
I didn’t mention it but yeah Edgerunners hit SO hard and is also one of my favorites. It really showed the people on the outskirts being ground down by the system aspect of the genre. It also helps that it was an absolutely gorgeously made Anime.
Exactly!
I if I had to pic just one, Serial Experiments Lain would be one of the safe choices. Not only was it way ahead of it’s time, going as far as to predict online movements like anonymous (knights, in the series), it has many themes that are relevant to this day.
One less known piece is Cloudpunk. This game made me legit fall on tears. It’s about how little people carry on under a capitalist dystopia. Which is basically almost how things already are but with flying cars.
I will have to check out Cloudpunk cause this totally flew under my radar, cause it looks very interesting.
Do pick it up!
I just installed it on my Steam Deck and have been having the best time playing. Amazing game to sink into the world they made.
My introduction to both cyberpunk and to Blade Runner was the Blade Runner PC game from 1997. First 1GB+ game I remember buying. I would walk out onto the balcony just to hear the Vangelis score…
I don’t really know since when I started to like cyberpunk, but I was gifted a book in a somewhat child-friendly cyberpunk setting. It was called Back-Up (Unfortunately only available in german). I don’t recall much of it, just that there was this hacker called “GoTo” uploaded his conciousness into a computer and was able to access the internet and stuff. His catchphrase was “bilbao” something like “everything will be fine”. I guess that really stuck with me, since I remembered it after 20 years…
The other big influence of mine was of course manga and anime. Ghost in the Shell was my favourite movie for a long time. I also watched Serial Experiments Lain, but didn’t really understand it. Just that it was cool as heck.
I have never heard of Back-Up and it’s really cool to hear about a non-English or Japanese Cyberpunk inspiration!
This probably won’t be a popular opinion, but Shadowrun is what introduced me to cyberpunk & I still love the setting.
I am running a Shadowrun splat in the Genesys tabletop system right now so I’m there with you!
Ghost Rider 2099 is a definitive cyberpunk graphic novel for me. Len Kaminski’s writing plus the graphic style were perfect.
Neuromancer, Deus Ex, and Shadowrun were my gateways into cyberpunk. This thread has been great - I have so much more to check out.
I feel like genre has only become more prescient and will continue to be.
I like all I’ve read so far from other comments, Blade Runner taking the lead by far. However I’d like to add a somewhat iconic yet often forgotten item to the list: Appleseed, the original one.
Aside from the Blade Runners, I’d say Akira.
