What would you say are the best old-school cyberpunk video games?
Note that I don’t actually care if it’s the “best”, I’m just looking for some fun older games to play. So give me something better than Raid 2020 and I’ll call it a win.
I’m thinking things like:
- Snatcher (1988)
- Blade Runner (1997)
- System Shock 2 (1999)
- Deus Ex (2000)
And just to prove they don’t have to be GOTY contenders…
- Slave Zero (2000)
- Shadowrun (1994)
- X-Kaliber 2097 (1994)
So yeah, give me some recommendations from the NES/SNES/N64 era (I’m not convinced there’s anything worth playing from the ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64 era). Maybe some Arcade (MAME) games too? I can’t think of any cyberpunk arcade games.
I’ve never played Omikron: The Nomad Soul or BloodNet before. Not sure if they’re worth my time.
Beneath a Steel Sky (1994, Amiga & MS-DOS) of course. You can get it for free at GOG among other places as it’s freeware now.
Good idea! Have you played the sequel Beyond a Steel Sky? I haven’t heard too much about that one.
Nope, in fact that’s the first time I heard about that!
Power blade series on the NES has to be my first encounter with cyberpunk after Total Recall. Amazing soundtrack too.
Awesome, thanks!
Do the european releases of contra count? (probotector) im a bitch for run’n’guns
Lol, that’s right. It’s the exact same game with just a sprite swap of the characters, right? Nice!
Slave Zero was great. Good soundtrack, good art for the time, fun gameplay.
Loved that game. I liked how they were able to preserve the sense of scale so you actually felt like a giant robot in a city even though gameplay-wise it was all just platforming.
Not 20 years old, but if you’re willing to look at 10, I’ll always shout out the often-overlooked Remember Me by DONTNOD, back before they did Life is Strange.
It’s a 3rd person action-adventure game set in a cyberpunk future where everyone has a cybernetic implant called the SenSen in their brain to allow all their memories to be uploaded into cloud, so they can revisit them whenever they want. Of course, this technology is the property of one corporation, Memorize, but I’m sure they wouldn’t do anything evil with the ability to read and store every memory of every person connected to the system, right? You play as Nilin, a former memory hacker with some bad amnesia, who is broken out of prison by unknown benefactors with their own agenda. Navigate the streets and slums of 2084 Paris, avoiding hit squads and breaking into memories to piece together your own fractured past.
Definitely a solid B-tier game, it didn’t blow anyone’s mind on release, but it’s decently fun to play, has an interesting story, and the atmosphere of the cyberpunk city is just perfect. Plus, it gets pretty damn cheap come sale times. I can’t recommend it enough for anyone with a love of cyberpunk and mid-tier games with heart making up for the lack of budget.
Nobody is going to say it here? I really, really like Syndicate. The original one.
I always had a soft spot for DreamWeb.
I found Omikron absolutely awesome when I played it back in the day. Also loved Outcast (1999) which - to me - has some similarities in feel, but the latter is decidedly not Cyberpunk.
Fahrenheit / Indigo Prophecy (2005, same game, different name depending on region, also by Quantic Dream like Omikron) is up there as well.
Tron 2.0 (2003) might be up your alley - look up playing it today, there’s quite a few unofficial fixes, mods and enhancements.
Neuromancer (preferably the Amiga version, slightly better graphics) is interesting in its own way, though it certainly doesn’t feel “modern” the way your examples above do.
Uplink (2006) could fit as well, it’s played wholly from the perspective of a hacker’s console. (Apropos that, I only just found/saw Quadrilateral Cowboy (2016) myself, gotta have a look.)
Cyberpunk Arcade… Hm, Vivaldia…? ;-)
I loved Tron 2.0. it did such a fantastic job of extending the universe defined by the movie. Going to the Internet, a backup archive, a low-powered PDA, and fighting a virus/corruption were all great ideas. I hate that Tron: Legacy squandered those ideas by saying “oh, the grid is just a computer game Flynn wrote” rather than it being a visual representation of actual computer technology. I probably should’ve set my avatar to a Tron 2.0 disc and not a Tron: Legacy disc…
Thanks for those other suggestions!
I… don’t recall Tron: Legacy saying anything of the sort. The original Tron took place in the Encom mainframe, and yeah, while the metaphor doesn’t hold up well if you think on it too hard, they did try to equate things in the Grid to real computer tech: all the “people” in the Grid were programs written by the users; the titular Tron was Alan’s security program (though what kind of security, I don’t recall it mentioning).
The Grid in Legacy loses the metaphor a bit, but it’s told/implied in flashbacks that the system in the arcade basement is either new, or wiped clean. The only program Flynn brings in is Tron, and he creates Clu not by traditional programing, but by “techno-magic” cloning his own digitized code from within the system. From there, while it’s not outright stated, the experiment seems to be Flynn creating from the inside, building things not from the perspective of a user sitting at a terminal, but from the perspective of a God forming a society inside of the machine. Most of these programs probably don’t “do anything” useful if you’re sitting at the terminal, that wasn’t the point.
But, yeah, it’s ultimately a big flashy action movie with the single best soundtrack of all time fight me, and you have to really fill in the metaphors yourself. Not sure if they were lost on the cutting room floor, or just never there to begin with and I’m reaching too hard, but either way, I really enjoyed Legacy, flawed as it may be.
I won’t argue that Tron 2.0 did the metaphors way better, though. I remember really enjoying that game.
Maybe I’m just interpreting things differently, but in the original movie, everything was a visual representation of actual computer technology. Like you said, the programs looked like their programmers, and the I/O tower was the interface with the real world. No one “wrote” those visualizations, that’s just what the inside of a computer “looked like” from the inside.
Tron 2.0 expanded on this by showing visual representations of the Internet, computer viruses, disk corruption, devices with minimal memory, backup servers, etc. Again, no one created these visualizations, it’s just what the inside of computers looked like.
But then Tron: Legacy came along and said “Flynn created this world in his off-hours”. I’m not arguing that he created them with god-like abilities from the inside, I’m just arguing that he did create them. It’s no longer just “what technology looks like from the other side of the screen”, now it’s “whatever Flynn decided to create”. So now the major plot point is that the ISOs are the one thing he didn’t create. So if there’s no technological equivalent of it being cloudy or raining within the Grid, we can just say “Flynn made it that way”.
I feel like this is wasted potential because we could’ve had a Tron-style visualization of WiFi, quantum computing, AI, etc. The Grid could’ve had better graphics with each new movie and it would’ve made sense in-universe because computing power had increased. But if the Grid is just what Flynn wrote before he died… that’s it. That’s the Grid. It can’t change.
But hey, I hope you’re right, I hope they continue with the “visualizations from the other side of the screen” in future movies. But I think Tron: Legacy intentionally dumbed it down for audiences so it became a “trapped in a video game” trope rather than visualizations of actual technology.
I mean, I’m definitely being nicer to it because I have a soft spot for the film, for sure. I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt in that, if the first movie showed us what it might look like when normal users interact with a computer in normal ways, and write programs based on what they want them to do/output, then the second movie is showing us what it might look like if programs were created for the sake of them existing, and they don’t necessarily “do” anything for a user on the outside. Like, if I code up program to be a calculator on the terminal, it might look at behave a certain way on the grid. But, if I go into the grid, and create a program that’s good at math, would it still be a calculator on the terminal? Or would it more likely do nothing when called, because it wasn’t written to take input and produce output on the terminal?
It’s an interesting question, and I think it can go a long way to excusing the breakdown of the computer metaphors in Legacy, but again, this is mostly my interpretation, it’s not explicitly confirmed by the text itself.
Sadly, I doubt we’ll get any more movies exploring these concepts any time soon. Legacy was supposed to be the start of a trilogy, but it didn’t make enough money, so the rest of it was canned by Disney. I think it’d me more likely to see some animated/live action Disney+ exclusive series in a few years, when they get tired of churning out Star Wars everything.
In any event, to bring this back around to the original question, I’ve added Tron 2.0 to my steam wishlist for the next sale, lol.
In any event, to bring this back around to the original question, I’ve added Tron 2.0 to my steam wishlist for the next sale, lol.
Haha, and that’s all that really matters. 😁
I don’t mean to keep this Tron discussion going… but I do want to make sure you’re aware of Tron: Uprising already on Disney+ and Tron: Ares with Jared Leto which is filming now.
Ah, that brings back some memories!
Tron 2.0 is a Monolith classic. For some reason I thought they were no longer around, but the excellent Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor is also one of theirs. Another great series (not related to cyberpunk) from them is No One Lives Forever. The first one had a bonus music CD with some great 60s inspired tracks.
I remember spending a lot of time with Uplink. It does make you feel like a movie hacker! The devs, Introversion, have a lot of interesting and original games. Defcon is inspired by the movie WarGames (with a hacker for the protagonist). Darwinia is about AI life, very original.
