Someone on here posted the dialogue from a conversation with an NSF “terrorist” from the game and I initially thought it was a pretty reasonable assessment of modern society and its problems. It was only when I read the comments that someone pointed out that the post was quoted verbatim from the game. Need to see if I can find that post…
TBF, for the last 30 years even Cyberpunk authors completely missed the point that capitalism will subvert these amazing technologies to make everything worse if we don’t do something. Neal Stephenson is a crypto shill.
Manna got rampant capitalism + AI pretty close, and has predicted McDonalds payment kiosks, Amazon worker abuse, and probably some of the tech layoffs too.
Wow… I’ve worked in the fast food industry for 2 years, and that really hits close to home. With the kitchen display systems and headsets, with modern technology it would be easy to implement that… very easy. We’d still need one manager on the line for de-escalating angry customers but that would end up essentially the same as the book synopsis described. And the subsequent dystopia… I could literally see this occurring tomorrow. Kinda scary.
Damn, that surprises and saddens me. I’ve only ever read one of his books, Diamond Age/A young lady’s illustrated primer, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and also thought there were some great critiques of the upper class
You’re a cyborg agent for a new branch of the federal government formed in response to a terrorist attack on us soil tasked with performing extrajudicial acts in order to keep access to the treatment for a pandemic under government control.
In the opening cutscene the governments response to the pandemic is revealed to be “let it rip” for profit.
You’re a new type of cyborg cop, that works for a new anti-terrorism unit to hunt down terrorists, formed after they bombed the twin towers. A global pandemic keeps the streets eerily quiet.
Yeah, I left out the spoilers and stuff that didn’t actually happen.
There’s a lot of what were open secrets in the 90s, like that the gov’t was scanning internet traffic and phone calls, the existence of the NSA, the CIA blackmailing US politicians, that gets combined with wacky conspiracies in there, which leaves a bad taste.
I got the game bundled with a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 kit and played it before, during, and after 9/11, and was blown away by the coincidences that appeared eerily prescient during this time.
Screen capture of DVD bonus feature from Prometheus (2012), a dictated letter by Peter Weyland about Eldon Tyrell, chief executive officer of the Tyrell Corporation
So, Prometheus establishes Tyrell Corporation and Weyland-Yutani as competitors! Neat.
There’s also some commentary from Ridley Scott, one of the displayed replicant body designs in 2049 is clearly an Engineer, and I believe a billboard for Weyland in one of the Blade Runners, but I can’t find that screenshot so maybe I’m misremembering that one.
Most of it is Easter Egg level stuff but there’s enough that it’s canon if you want it to be. Or not.
Really, the biggest takeaway I learned from this connection hunt back in the day was that the Blade Runner humanity had multiple colonies on other planets, which was just not something I remembered being a thing from the movies.
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