The forgotten cyberspace of the Neuromancer computer game

boing
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Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/06/30/the-forgotten-cyberspace-of-th.html

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As someone who played the game back in the day, I think there were two problems with it, neither of which depended on the hardware limitations:

  1. The authors of the game had a lot of text that was intended to be humorous. Personally, I didn’t find it that funny, but more importantly, it conflicted with the Gibsonian atmosphere.
  2. The authors seemed to think that the universe of the Sprawl was a Orwellian surveillance state, with robots in meatspace saying things like “Move along, citizen”. That isn’t how cyberpunk works. Instead, the point was that governments were weak and that real power resided in corporations rather than the State.
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On a completely different topic, Neuromaencer is pretty interesting to follow.

http://neuromaencer.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140904094909-33342381-is-neuromaencer-art-or-copyright-violation

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I still have my code wheel for that game.

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Oh, man!

I had that game . . . but never took off the shrink wrap.

Something about the art and such didn’t appeal to me, and I kept in “NIB” to use as a gift or sell.

Eventually I gave all my old games to a collector, who is still probably jumping up and down.

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People still make this mistake about the genre.

I also had the game, yeah, it wasnt very good…

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I was obsessed with this game as a kid but wasn’t very good at it. I recently found a “Let’s Play” of it on YouTube that I really liked because it showed me some big things I missed (and the nostalgia factor). There’s like 5 or 6 parts, but unfortunately he doesn’t make it all the way to the end. Here’s the first part -

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Topics like these want me to make a point and click adventure game. Then I remember my attention span is limited, my ability to do art assets, coding, or even basic planning are limited to non-existaint, and I"m not sure what if any audiance exists.

Then again there is Twine for making something text-y and outputting to html.

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Huh, I loved it, mostly because of the atmosphere. But I think I hadn’t read the novel when I first played it.

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Maybe they should have done a pure adventure and left it to people’s imagination?

“You are standing in an open parking lot of a Brainmart, with an armored front door.
There is a small mailbox here.”

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Other great 80’s and 90’s cyberpunk games were Circuit’s Edge by George Alec Effinger and Blade Runner.

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I also suggest Beneath a Steel Sky, which is available for free these days (legitimately, courtesy of the developers) and runs everywhere thanks to ScummVM. (An especially good thing, as it was not so easy to get running back in the day.)

Cyberspace in that game is relatively tiny, and everyone is purple and naked. So, give it a few years.

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Yes. Blade Runner by…
IIRC there were 28 or so by that name. Pare by Univerisity or Studio maker and whether everything by Running With Scissors (okay, they had OpenGL to work with…) contains a pocket Blade Runner, or by CPU epoch, and we land with what?

I mean, there was a text adventure or 30 too.
Not looking forward to seeing the very nice pacing of that on Tizen even so, thanks.

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Now, if one put it forth in (2) that Evil will always win because Good is stupid, it doesn’t sound dismal.
[Linda Belcher voice:] Make Bobby Great Sometime!?
Having the partisan AF corporate world nonetheless have less ad bellum propoganda, and other jurisdictional gestures, is an important grace note.


Contemporaneous for 2 years or not?
humanityplus.org …

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The thing is that early Wired actually had content while M2K was just a bunch of west coast drug zombie in jokes.

That said, the typography and layout of both magazines in their early days could well have been considered a war crime.

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It was kind of neat thinking that there was a CJKV-compatible DAC (Design Automation Conference) split between typography and layout engines, news and longer reportage, run by west coast health nuts in all states. That there were discontinuities appealed to the dynamism of it.

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I believe that this is one of the games that GOG.com gives you for free when you open an account with them. The good thing there is that they patch their games to work with modern OS’ without needing to play with the emulators yourself (not that ScummVM is onerous to get working).

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