STALKER7

I remember my mother telling me to read Neuromancer one “OMG, I’m sooo bored” teenage summer afternoon. I remember watching Alien, and later, Escape from New York, Blade Runner, Tron, and Akira at a friend’s house.

I was hooked. They were different – forbidden and transgressive in some way I didn’t understand back then. I didn’t know why; they were obviously science fiction. Not the apocalyptic Damnation Alley, Alas Babylon, On the Beach, Canticle for Leibowitz, or Planet of the Apes. It certainly wasn’t the shiny, space socialist kind I knew from Star Trek or the space fantasy of Star Wars. Or even the ever-cool British mod of Space 1999. (gosh, that seemed so far away back then)

The shows were cheesy, sure. But they were somehow more real. Grimy, gritty, rebellious, and much more cool. I didn’t hear the terms dystopia and high-tech, low-life until later and understood that “Cyberpunk” was street-level sci-fi. Science Fiction about regular people on a planet that didn’t end from a huge asteroid, exponential overpopulation, a plague, pollution, or a mushroom cloud.

Or a bright future where everyone was nice, pretty, and principled.

No, the cyberpunk timeline had locked on to more or less the same trajectory as real life – widening and deepening the usual problems and disparities – but never so much they metastasized to a fatal degree. “The more things change…”

Decades went by. Things faded, got shouldered aside by serious but good, real-world adult stuff.

But I remember it was right after the Y2K scare that I unexpectedly ran into a guy named JC Denton in a PC game titled Deus Ex – and it all came back: the hard, scarred, auged and indentured, conspiracy-tangled future.

I’d scribbled out home brew rules over the years, gluing 1/72 Airfix medievals to cardboard bases and designating different stands as Shooters, Chargers, or Leaders to play with my eldest son on the kitchen table in Nova Scotia. There were others, one of which became the foundation for Zona Alfa.

But the first war game rules I offered for public consumption were cyberpunk.

Remember the 1993 computer game Syndicate? Squads of cyborg agents in trench coats, running and gunning for their corporate masters in the 16-color, isometric urban sprawl? I wanted to translate that onto the tabletop and set it in my fictional c-punk city, New Kowloon.

I imagined a cooperative, not competitive, game that could use some of the random miniatures I owned, with little-to-no learning curve/prep time for those inevitable game sessions when everybody is running late but still wants to hang out, chuck dice, and play with cool toy soldiers. That’s how the game, Hardwired Exploit Zero came about. *And why.

I suppose this post is simply to mark the fact that even though I’m a long way from that summer afternoon and those late nights in front of a friend’s 20″ color TV, those first, simple lines of mirror-shade code are still running in the background – mutating, replicating, infecting and inspiring another iteration, another generation. On and on.

A link to the Exploit Zero rule books can be found above. And if you’re up for a cyberpunk, tech-noir murder, take a look at Soul Cache. (Kindle or Audible)

Thanks. Good hunting.

• it has no association whatsoever with a derivative s-f novel or an outdated, RPG supplement.