The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future
The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future
The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future
By Darryn King
November 14, 2020
Summary
Now a much wider audience is finally getting a good look at what Pondsmith has been imagining this whole time, with a new video game adapted from his life's work.
Due out on December 10, Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most lustfully anticipated games in recent memory.
Pondsmith, now in his 60s, has been known to wear his own cyberpunk uniform: black leather jacket, black jeans, motorcycle boots, mirror shades.
"Writing," Pondsmith tells me, "Is a lot like basically eating a pound of dough, a whole pepperoni, a couple of pounds of mozzarella, and a bunch of spices, then throwing up a pizza." It takes a lot of work to make an unreal world feel real.
For eight years, the Polish video-game developer CD Projekt Red has likewise been consumed with the task of making Pondsmith's world feel authentic on-screen.
In 2012, when the studio first contacted R. Talsorian Games about adapting Cyberpunk, Pondsmith paid a visit to the Warsaw headquarters expecting the operation, he has joked, to consist of "Four guys and a goat." Instead, Pondsmith met a team with epic ambitions, well on the way to becoming what it is now-one of the most valuable gaming companies in Europe.
Like the tabletop games before it, Cyberpunk 2077 asks serious-minded questions about the place of technology in society.
"Technology is sort of like the magic of this world," the game's director and the head of studio, Adam Badowski, says of his understanding of Pondsmith's core themes.
After years of development featuring an attention to detail verging on the maniacal, the result, Pondsmith said, "Looked like it had walked out of my brain."
The son of a psychologist and a U.S. Air Force officer, Pondsmith spent the first 18 years of his life shuttling around with the military.
Reference
King, D. (2020, November 14). The Role-Playing Game That Predicted the Future. Retrieved November 26, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/mike-pondsmith-cyberpunk-2077/616924/