|
The blame for
the proliferation of the "cyber" prefix
lies at the door of writer William Gibson, but the best known
media cyberimage is the sleazy cross between a high-tech future
and a detective story in the film Blade Runner.
This feel has
pervaded a good few games, particularly graphical adventures.
Still very
playable, the elderly Beneath a Steel Sky
puts the wise-cracking hero into a technological nightmare,
while The Pandora Directive's blockbusting five
CDs contain a superb state-of-the-art rendition of this particular
style. In
Pandora you are trying to find a missing scientist
who was involved with an alien landing, while attempting to keep
your private life together.
Brilliant.
|
On the
page, Gibson's Neuromancer seems to define the approach,
but it owes a lot to the glitzy sixties work of Samuel Delaney
and Alfred Bester.
Try
Babel-17 by Delaney or Tiger!
Tiger! and The Demolished Man by Bester to see
where space adventure crosses over into something more bizarre.
An
excellent adventure that pre-guesses much of the online world
is John Brunner's underrated Shockwave Rider.
Brunner is
a hugely variable writer, but here he is on top form, setting
an individual against the wired masses, his scenario is based
on the predictions of Alvin Toffler's predictive best seller,
Future Shock |
