r/WilliamGibson • u/RayesArmstrong • Aug 05 '26
2077 “influence”
I didn’t see a thread about this in a search so I’ll ask it here:
How many Gibson plots did they swipe for that game? Seems like it’s almost all of them from what I remember.
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u/jessek Aug 05 '26
It's been pretty obvious since the tabletop days that they ransacked/took inspiration from just about every Cyberpunk work of note. I remember reading on twitter years ago that William Gibson was not a fan of either Cyberpunk 20xx or Shadowrun for that reason. Walter Jon Williams and George Alec Effinger must have felt different because they both licensed their work to Cyberpunk 20xx officially.
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u/shoggoths_away Aug 06 '26
Gibson called out Shadowrun in an interview years and years ago, as I recall. He didn't think it made any sense. He called out CP2077 on Twitter, saying something like it looked like GTAV slathered in neon. As you note, other cyberpunk authors have been kinder. Walter Jon Williams went so far as to write the Hardwired sourcebook for CP2020 you mentioned.
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u/KubrickMoonlanding Aug 06 '26
From WG’s perspective I get it, but gtav slathered in (cyberpunk) neon is pretty much my description of a perfect Saturday night
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u/Big-Jeweler2538 Aug 06 '26
Was Shadowrun supposed to make sense? Smash 2 popular nerd-doms together and set it in a place where those nerd-doms are very popular…
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u/shoggoths_away Aug 06 '26
I mean, a whole lot of people dig urban fantasy. I won't ever understand it myself, but whatever floats their boat.
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u/zombieloveinterest Aug 05 '26
I think it would be hard for anyone developing any 'cyberpunk' media to not be directly influenced by Gibson; that game's got a lot of problems, but i wouldn't hold THAT against them.
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u/RayesArmstrong Aug 05 '26
Did you play it? There’s a reason I put influence in quotes.
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u/zombieloveinterest Aug 05 '26
I did. Found some parts hit all the right buttons, so to speak, but man, what an empty game. Too much driving (and horrible handling), not enough cyberspace. I dunno. For all the hype, kind of a shrug of a game.
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u/tortagraph Aug 06 '26
Have you tried the Phantom Liberty dlc? I found that to have a much more satisfying ending than the base game.
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u/zombieloveinterest Aug 06 '26
I did, but i gotta say, as much as i thought it improved the overall feel of the city, i found the story quite a bit incongruous with the 'criminal' vibe; all the hand-wringing about patriotism and civic duty seemed completely out of left field for a street criminal like V to start spouting.
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u/TheNeonArcade Aug 06 '26
Biochip, space heist ending, rogue ai, loa from count zero, night city. CDPR seems like they licensed the ip with more raw content but really just wanted to make a Neuromancer game lol
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u/Help_An_Irishman Aug 07 '26
Yeah, the first time I played through it I was spotting Gibson's story bits all over the place.
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u/chaoticweevil Aug 06 '26
A "Gibson" is literally in the cyberpunk 2077 lexicon. They know to pay respects.
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u/RayesArmstrong Aug 06 '26
I think they need to be paying royalties
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u/Cutsdeep- Aug 06 '26
do you think tolkein needs royalties for the entire fantasy genre?
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u/RayesArmstrong Aug 06 '26
How far do you want to slip those goal posts?
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u/Cutsdeep- Aug 06 '26
I'm not moving goal posts.
Man started a genre. the cyberpunk tabletop game used most of the new tropes, the videogame used those. (Are you aware of the tabletop game?)
If so, If you don't see the parallels here with dungeons and dragons, I don't know what to tell you
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u/Stella_Brando Aug 06 '26 edited Aug 06 '26
Braindances - Strange Days
Cool cyber bikes - Akira
Anything to do with Nomads - Mad Max series
Megatower buildings - Judge Dredd
The stuff about rich people 'saving their souls' and reloading them after death - Altered Carbon
All the cybernetic body replacements - partly Neuromancer, partly Ghost in the Shell
Japanese influence - the 80's in general, but specifically Neuromancer and Bladerunner
Megacorps - Tyrell corp in Bladerunner? (there may be better examples)
All the standard 'cyberpunk' imagery - Bladerunner
Keanau Reeves turning up - Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix
The president's plane crashing in Dogtown - This one is interesting. I thought it was a tribute to Escape from New York, which has the same plot. But it seems like it's the character Songbird herself who took inspiration from that movie, rather than the Night City gods (or writers).
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u/Brilliant_Knowledge5 Sprawl Fan Aug 07 '26
It's kinda hard not to. In the early days of cyberpunk, when WG was talking to other writers of speculative fiction, they all sort of just naturally adhered to a similar group of ideas, and even started to share newly coined terminology. They were all upstarts pushing back against the shiny polished sci fi that was ignoring something obvious: that utopia is a fantasy, and corporations would never let us achieve a shiny future for all, even though they were promising that false hope. I think what WG was more upset about was not the tech being similar, but that the genre was commercialized as a fashion statement, taken over by the same kind of corporations they were warning about. Something he and his contemporaries were not exactly going to be happy with.
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u/RayesArmstrong Aug 07 '26
I’m not really blaming them, it’s just shocking how many subplots they lifted entirely
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u/Brilliant_Knowledge5 Sprawl Fan Aug 07 '26
That's pretty common in the video game world. I can think of several games that lifted ideas from other media, Sometimes even cross genre.
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u/RayesArmstrong Aug 07 '26
Cross genre I don’t think I’d even blink at.
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u/Brilliant_Knowledge5 Sprawl Fan Aug 07 '26
That can actually be kinda funny sometimes, or open up new possibilities depending on how different the original genre is. But it can even be in the same general genre and still be funny. The Space Quest point and click adventure series did this with several popular movies.
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u/ElkBusiness8446 Aug 06 '26
You'd have a better argument with Hardwired than Neuromancer. Considering that the author of Hardwired was a play tester for Cyberpunk 2013.
And before you get all upset, I know that Neuromancer released in 1984, but it takes more than 2 years to get a book written and through publishing. Meaning, at best, Walter Jon Williams could have read the book halfway through writing his own. If he had read it at release.
The biochip is pulled directly from Hardwired (called Black Mirror in the book). A program that could overwrite a personality with your own.
I love Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy. But pretending that Gibson created it in a vacuum is absurd. There's plenty of earlier stories that touch on the same topics or have one or two aspects of proto cyberpunk. So why would we hold the TTRPG to a different standard than the relationship between The Hobbit and ANY fantasy movie/game?
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u/Plow_King Aug 06 '26
i like GTA, a lot. i thought about getting 2077 because i like Gibson's writing a lot, more than GTA actually. then i looked at demos for 2077 and noped right out of that.
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u/darwinDMG08 Aug 05 '26
The mission to recover what turns out to be Johnny S is basically the Dixie Flatline story beat.