Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, William Gibson's pioneering cyberpunk novel, now in adventure/RPG hybrid form. And wow, is it a weird little historical artefact.
The future's always been a tough thing to predict, but does generally go one of three basic routes—dystopia, utopia, everything turned into sentient cheese by deep space super-bacteria. Oh, that tiresome old cliché. When it comes to anything with the word "cyber" in it, you pretty much know what you're going to get. It's going to be dark. It's going to be cynical. Chances are it's going to be heavily "inspired" by Blade Runner. Surprisingly few people will have worked out that carrying umbrellas around 24/7 is a really, really smart idea. And it's almost certainly going to owe a serious debt to William Gibson's Neuromancer, which was published in 1984 and is one of those books so influential that is almost doesn't need to be read any more to know more or less what goes down and the kind of elements it plays with.
