I picked this up from a RPG shop way out on the outskirts of Peterborough, the name of which I forget, but I remember it had a specialist doll shop round the back run by the owner of the RPG shop’s wife. It was pretty much the only place to get really indie RPGs in the immediate region. Even Boston and Lincoln wouldn’t have the sort of curios this shop had.
And that was what the 1st edition of R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk was. It came in a box with 2 six sided dice and two books. One which had the character generation, background and general rules. And the other was Friday Night Firefight, a standalone set of combat rules that Cyberpunk used. And it was quite the eye opener. Unlike other games I’d played this combat was short and nasty. Even more brutish than WFRP, which was always tempered by how hard it was to actually hit things. Here, hitting things was easy if you were close to the target. And getting hit by a bullet really hurt. And getting hit by lots killed you. This wasn’t a cinematic combat system, there was a definite sense that if your character got into a fight at any time, there was a chance you weren’t going to walk out.
And it felt very punk too (at least compared to later editions), the paper it was printed on was rough, the layout’s clear, but very ghetto in their design. The edge of the pages of my copy hadn’t been properly guillotined. It felt like a zine, especially compared to the slickness of a GW product or the strangely quaint TSR house style. It kicked off a trend for Cyberpunk-ish games, quickly being overshadowed by the luke-warm watered down Cyberpunk of FASA’s Shadowrun (ELVES? THEY AREN’T PUNK!), until the release of more professional Cyberpunk 2020, which is bone-fide classic tabletop RPG and was a deserved success (though it fell afoul of rule bloat through various supplements about 5-6 years into it’s life, which signified the end of it’s lifespan).
Now, I’ve never been a big fan of William Gibson, but I was a big fan of Repo Man and the sourcebook mentioned that as a cyberpunk film. And an article in Fantasia magazine argued that Cyberpunk was dead and that Repo Man was the only true cyberpunk film. And so my games tended to be influenced more by that film, the first Mad Max film and crime dramas than anything from Neuromancer. Indeed the world of the original Cyberpunk RPG was much closer to our own, than later editions which were closer to Gibson’s ouevre and more noticeably – Bubblegum Crisis (the book “Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads” admitted that the setting of Cyberpunk 2020 was animemetal, rather than cyberpunk. Good book btw, if you were to run Cyberpunk, that’s the one book you should get alongside the 2020 rulebook. My brief look at 3rd Edition gave me the impression of a poorly laid out, poorly illustrated Snow Crash influenced game. OK this long aside has finished, carry on).
R. Talsorian is still around today, but a shadow of it’s former self, in part due to the RPG market and in part due to head honcho Mike Pondsmith’s Xbox related job. I’ll get to some of their other games later on, as there’s some beauties in there.
Addendum: I also recall our teenage gaming group would on more than one occasion plan what we would do in the event of an apocalypse, and the ensuing collapse of civilization. This kind of thinking also made the dystopia of the Cyberpunk world appealing. I’d like to think this was because we’d grown up in the 80s and had seen things like the BBC’s adaptation of the Day of The Triffids at a young age. But I suspect it is just something all kids do at some point. After all Nostradamus, occult nonsense, being a goth, witchcraft and the like tend to popular among teenagers. Is thinking about doom and gloom entertaining at 14?