The Early Days
First emerging in the 1970s, the concept cyberpunk is described as a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world, which features an unsettling mix of high-tech and impoverished society, often being noted as being a massive juxtaposition. Lowlife and high-tech mix to create a dark future.
Although cyberpunk themes started circulating around the 1970s, The first official use of this word was used as the title of a short story novel, written by Bruce Betake, which follows the story of a teenage gang vandalizing the net, which in modern terms is equivalent to that of hacking. After this novel was later published in 1983 - the term and concept of cyberpunk grew in popularity amongst other writers including Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rocker, and Katsuhiro Otomo.
The theme of cyberpunk quickly overlapped into other industries including film and fashion, with some notable movies including Blade Runner, Mad Max, The Terminator, and of course, one of the most successful cyberpunk movie franchises of our generation - The Matrix Trilogy. As far as fashion goes, the love for cyberpunk runway looks makes a comeback every few decades, it seems. From Muller Fall Collection of 1995, to Balenciaga’s Terminator inspired Spring 2007 Collection and most recently, Jean Paul Gaultier’s 2019 Fall Couture, the cyberpunk genre keeps on making a comeback, bigger and better each and every time.
The Merge of Cyberpunk and Gaming
It was absolutely inevitable that the theme of cyberpunk would infiltrate the booming gaming industry, where the world saw games such as Shadow run and Blade Runner hit the shelves in the 1980s/1990’s. Similarly to other industries, the cyberpunk genre isn’t leaving any time soon. In fact, the popularity of cyberpunk games has been booming over the last few years. One of the most popular cyberpunk games of the last few decades, ‘Cyberpunk’, which was first published in 1998 and written by Mike Pondsmith, saw a return to the gaming market with three additional editions being released in 1990, 2005 and 2020. Cyberpunk 2077, the latest version released in 2020, saw a whopping 18 million copies being sold by April 2022.
With the main theme of cyberpunk being extremely futuristic, advanced technology, the introduction of cyberpunk themed games into the world of Web3 feels like a perfect fit. Web3 is what many believe to be the new age of the internet - fully decentralized, built on digital ledgers known as blockchains, allowing individual users to have control over their own content and data - unlike large corporations having centralized control in the age of Web2 (the internet as we know it today). Web3 gaming does just that, it gives users and players the ability to control their data and assets online, safe from the hackers that we see in many cyberpunk stories. The decentralization of these games is merely one appealing aspect of the Web3 gaming world.
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