What to Read, Watch and Play Before Cyberpunk 2077

Table of Contents

• What to Read, Watch and Play Before Cyberpunk 2077
• What to watch: Minority Report
• What to watch: Ghost In The Shell
• What to watch: The Matrix
• What to watch: Blade Runner

What to watch: Minority Report

Minority Report can be a particularly tough show for more sensitive viewers.

It's hard to treat the Minority Report as a full-fledged representative of cyberpunk. There's not enough dirt, neon lights illuminating metropolises, streets drowning in rain and humans – the city is even too sterile and well-groomed. No wonder, then, that Spielberg's film was based on a short story by Philip K. Dick that inspired cyberpunk artists, but never made it into the mainstream itself. Yet the director's vision combines too many aspects with this aesthetic to simply ignore them.

Minority Report follows agent John Anderton, who, through a "prophecy" of clairvoyants, is accused of a crime he is yet to commit. As we follow his desperate attempts to prove his innocence, we will witness shady implant dealers, the installation of cyberweapons, the fight against corrupt authorities, and we will ask ourselves important questions about the free will of the individual. It's hard to say that this is one of Spielberg's best works – there are many of them, after all – but it's still a great film, combining a disturbingly clean vision of the future with the viewer's slow discovery of dirt hidden under a sterile coating.

What to play: Shadowrun (series)

From 2013 to 2015, there were three games in the Shadowrun series... and we've been waiting for a fourth ever since.

Cyberpunk 2077 is not the only mainstream production to use the popular RPG license. A few years prior to CD Projekt RED, Harebrained Schemes studio took on the Shadowrun system, which was at the peak of its popularity in the 1990s., and converted it into a classic turn-based RPG. All three parts released so far are solid games, which have an engaging plot and unique atmosphere to make up for the slightly too linear gameplay.

Shadowrun's greatest strength, however, is its unique world, in which all boundaries between cyberpunk and classic fantasy have been blurred. In this neon-lit vision of the future, corporations function almost entirely independent of governments, cyberspace is permanently fused with reality, and skill-enhancing implants are used on a daily basis... on the other hand, you can always find a troll with a rifle on the streets or a dwarf with modern implants. This combination gives the bleak future of this universe an extra layer of almost magical color.

1. More about the Shadowrun series

What to read: Snow Crash

Over the years, cyberpunk novels have followed a formula. Meanwhile, Neal Stephenson decided to break out and bend the rules of that aesthetic slightly with his Snow Crash. The action of the most popular book in his portfolio takes place naturally in the world of the near future, where conditions are dictated by large corporations, unbridled capitalism destroys the identity of the individual, and the boundary between reality and cyberspace almost completely fades... but it also adds references to Sumerian mythology and the Bible, and the main plot is inextricably linked to strictly linguistic issues.

Stephenson's novelization of the universe, of course, results in some chaos in the narrative, through which some readers may bounce back from Snow Crash, but others will delight in this bizarre, semi-futuristic, semi-fantastic world and a story full of absurdities and black humor. It is one of the landmark science fiction novels of the 1990s. that started a separate trend of postcyberpunk - and that's why it's worth giving it a chance.

What to listen: Zircon

Compared to most of the artists featured in this compilation, Zircon – specifically his 2012 album Identity Sequence – seems a far more accessible proposition to a mass audience. It doesn't have such a "brutal" sound or the bass turning our guts upside down. There are also no synthesizers taking us back to the 1980s. It is music with a more sterile, computer-based timbre, enriched with various sound effects. This also makes it – unlike Gesaffelstein, for example - an ideal audio background for work.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear Zircon in compilations designed for programmers. There are plenty of those on YouTube. The aforementioned album Identity Sequence is by far the most "cyberpunk" of his achievements, but if you want to dig into the works of the American artist, you will find a lot of really interesting electronic music – including many soundtrack remixes for classic games such as Super Smash Bros. or System Shock.