It's my personal view that Cyberpunk is now a retro-game. And that's cool, nothing wrong with a big dollop of retro-nostalgia gaming. Running around the Streets stickin it to the Man!
But I think a new Cyberpunk, working off of today's social anxieties (and not those of the late 70s-late 80s/early 90s) would look and play very differently.
I think one other thing to note is that, even in 1990, it was consciously partially retro.
Remember the key inspiration Mike Pondsmith names for Cyberpunk 2020 isn't something futuristic, but rather something retro -
Streets of Fire.
en.wikipedia.org
A 1984 movie set in a vaguely 1950s but somehow also 1980s past-future. Totally bizarre. When I first read Pondsmith saying that, I was like 15, and I had, remarkably, seen Streets of Fire, and thought it was terrible. So I was very vexed by why Mike was so keen on this, and not say, Bladerunner, Neuromancer, etc. But when I rewatched it in my 30s, I found I understood it much better, like it better, and also could see how important it was to Cyberpunk 2020.
As an adult, though, it makes a lot more sense. Cyberpunk 2020 is essentially a romantic setting, despite the apparent cynicism. The world may be a terrible place, but people find each other, there's love, life, hope, goodness and so on. One person with a gun and motorbike can make a difference.
And that's something that most "dystopian" settings just don't have. That small-r romanticism. Partly because big-R Romanticism tends to be rejected by the sort of people who want to write dystopian or realistic/cynical visions of the future, and out with that bathwater often goes the. Everything is a huge downer. Sometimes you get elements of this, but usually the setting is slanted in such a way that it's a lot more depressing than the 2020 one, which, for all that's wrong with it, feels like it could fall apart, like something better could, perhaps, come out of it. That you're not permanently locked into a dystopia (whereas with most cyberpunk RPGs you are, including ones inspired by 2020).
Yeah a new version of Cyberpunk makes for pretty dispiriting gaming.
I think this is representative of the issue. If it was really Cyberpunk 2020-style, Mike Pondsmith-style, it wouldn't be quite that dispiriting. There'd be hope, community, altruism, people the corps couldn't crush, love blooming on the battlefield and so on.
And I think this underlying romanticism, this one-person-can-make a difference vibe, this glimmer of light and hope of at least having a good time before you die and going out in a blaze of glory (** Johnny Silverhand has entered the chat **) and so on is part of why Cyberpunk 2020 went so big, and continues to stand out from other cyberpunk RPGs. I think you'd need a special individual, one with a vision, and one will to sometimes push aside realism, cynicism, and so on for the sake of hope and glory (without falling into the trap of narrowly ideological moralizing, which a couple of games have) to make the 2023 equivalent of Cyberpunk 2020 (Cyberpunk Red being really just a development of the now far-retro 2020). It could be done, and I hope it is, because I'm kind of tired of trawling through dystopian cyberpunk RPGs which just seem pointless to play because of the vibe/setting.
