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NME | Music, Film, TV, Gaming & Pop Culture News

The pen-and-paper RPG Mike Pondsmith wrote and published way back in the 1980s may have needed a few tweaks and changes in the 30-plus years since he wrote it, but it might surprise you to know that the video game we’ll all be playing later this week, Cyberpunk 2077, retains much of its DNA.

Pondsmith not only created the original Cyberpunk RPG but also worked closely alongside developer CD Projekt Red (CDPR) on the upcoming title. Speaking to NME ahead of the massive release later this week, Pondsmith sits down to chat with us about the evolution of Cyberpunk, the challenges of writing about future technology, and how the game’s narrative serves as a warning to society.

Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in a dystopian future, in a place called Night City – a fictional Californian megalopolis. An economic crisis which resulted in nuclear warfare has devastated the United States, and with the rest of the country spiralling into disaster, people from all over have descended upon the booming Night City. Dominated by multinational corporations and equally ruthless gangs, however, the Blade Runner-inspired city is far from a sanctuary.

The video game’s plot stays true to its source material. Pondsmith’s 1988 game also describes a world ravaged by war, the collapse of society and of course, the original Night City. In Welcome To Night City, a booklet that introduces players to the setting of the pen-and-paper RPG, the metropolis is described as a placeholder for a dark, crime-ridden city in which players could immerse themselves.

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It’s not every day you see a pen-and-paper RPG get turned into a video game – especially not to one of Cyberpunk 2077’s scale. Pondsmith, in his warm and self-effacing manner, attributes this to the way the team looked at Cyberpunk .

“It actually is a really interesting evolution,” he explains. “The storyline progresses fairly well, because we always thought of the whole Cyberpunk world as basically being a progressive comic book. It starts off – you got little origin stories and things like that – and then you move up to big crossovers, and then you move up to a really big story.”

While Pondsmith says the video game adaptation retains the original Cyberpunk’s central tenets, it’s been almost 40 years since the Cyberpunk RPG was written. But the Cyberpunk universe has evolved to keep pace with the very real trends that stem from current-day technology.

Pondsmith describes having employed a person whose “entire job” during the production phase of Cyberpunk 2077 was to stay ahead of tech trends. “We had him sign up to everything from Jane’s Defense Weekly to microbiological research magazines, because we needed to stay ahead,” he laughs.

“The technological basis will change, but the other stuff won’t. We get ahead of the tech curve a lot by doing our homework. If we talk about a weapon, we probably used that weapon at some point. I’m not a surgeon, but a friend of mine’s father was a neurosurgeon and I’d go: ‘Can we do this?’ And he’d go, ‘Yeah, you can do that, but it’s stupid. You’d kill your patient’.”

“Keeping it real” was a crucial aspect to the development of Cyberpunk because “then people know the world is real and they can do their homework and go, yeah, that could happen”, he says.

“And so it’s not as much the technology is new, it’s that more people believe in the reality of the world, and that’s our secret.”

That said, Pondsmith also acknowledges that he’s had to make some technological tweaks to the story over the years – especially when it came to the internet.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the seminal 1984 novel that launched the sub-genre, described the internet as a “matrix”, a virtual plane that’s wholly encompassing. In the original RPG, characters can flit in and out of it much like Neo in the movie that owes a big debt to Gibson’s book. The internet as we know it today, though, doesn’t function in that way. So Pondsmith and his team had to rethink their approach.

“We tend to use the net as little places we go to, and so we had to design the net set we did in these worlds to fit more of that than the ‘I’m flying through cyberspace’,” he says. “Because at this point, when you see that, you’re kind of looking at it thinking Hackers or Tron. We don’t do that. I think that’s the biggest change.”

“Technology is more than what it is, it’s how people use it. For example, video phones like this,” he adds thoughtfully. We’re talking to each other on opposite sides of the world, connected via the magic of Zoom.

“For years we’ve had video phones. We’ve had video phones since 1964 or ’65, I think, but we don’t use them, because there’s never been a social reason to use them,” he tells us.

“But thank god for Zoom [now]. If we didn’t have things like Skype and Zoom, this society would grind to a halt.”

Cyberpunk is a massive game, built on hundreds, if not thousands of different stories. Pondsmith reminds us that a lot of these stories echo the state of our world today, and what it could become. Poignantly, he describes how the powerful prey on the weak in Night City – something that hits a little close to home.

“Cyberpunk is political, but it’s not political in a blue-state-red-state-conservative-liberal [way],” he says. “It is basically [that] people deserve to be able to get a decent meal, live in a decent place and do all that if they’re willing to work for it, and not get screwed over by people more powerful than they are, who may not need to even screw them over, but are doing it on principle because they think they can do it.”

Thankfully, in the game at least, that’s where the heroes come in. “Characters in Cyberpunk are heroes, and survive and do well because they are willing to fight for family or friends, for their neighbourhoods,” Pondsmith tells us.

This fight for change, for survival, is a huge takeaway for players, he says. Reflecting on the world’s current climate, Pondsmith tells us, “It’s not like we should definitely change everything to make it some perfect world. We’re not going to get there. But we have to get some balance. Right now, we don’t have a lot of balance and we need to get that, or we will not be here much longer. Nature bats last.”

“Cyberpunk is a warning, not an aspiration.”

Listening to Pondsmith speak, we can’t help but think CDPR must’ve nailed his vision of the game. He smiles as tells us, however, it took much emphasis on his part over the game’s massive eight-year cycle.

The most important thing he had to stress to CDPR when development got underway was this: the game had to be specifically cyberpunk, not the sleek, optimistic future depicted in general sci-fi.

To get people to see that, CDPR had to fly Pondsmith over to its headquarters in Krakow, Poland, to sit down and explain “this is why it’s like this, this is how it works”.

“I had a situation once, where I went in the first time, and a bunch of the prop group came up and said, ‘Hey, check out the guns we have’. And they have these silver Star Wars-looking blaster things,” he says, smiling at the memory. “I said, ‘No, you’re not getting it’.

“Cyberpunk guns are bulky, black – matte black – nasty-looking things that say: ‘Hi, I’m here to kill you’. They’re not nice and they’re not science fiction. They should be one step beyond what I could go over to Cheaper Than Dirt [a discount guns and ammo seller in the US] and buy. They have to have that feel, because otherwise people will not accept this as reality. I had to get people to see that.”

But Pondsmith grins as he confirms that otherwise – and “feel-wise” – everything else about the game, from the aesthetics to the music to the narrative, “is pretty darn close” to what he’d envisaged all those years ago.

“When I worked on Matrix Online, I remember my big thing was just basically getting out and wandering around the city. But at that time, we couldn’t support a really big city. It’s just no way. The frame rates would have been dead.”

“We have that city now,” he says beaming, “and there’s an amazing amount of stuff. I could wander through [the Night City district] Watson all day. I would go people-watch in Watson. I would go get on the trains and go places, and I want people to see that. I want them to go, in the end, ‘I may not like Night City entirely, but I wouldn’t mind visiting it’. I would love to see bumper stickers around that said: ‘I visited Night City and all I got was this bumper sticker and several gunshots’.”

Cyberpunk 2077 will be released on December 10 for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Google Stadia. The game will be also playable on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X via backwards compatibility.

The post ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ co-creator Mike Pondsmith: “‘Cyberpunk’ is a warning, not an aspiration” appeared first on NME | Music, Film, TV, Gaming & Pop Culture News.

NME | Music, Film, TV, Gaming & Pop Culture News

As the year draws to a close, it is difficult to imagine a time without socially-distanced pub trips and forced virtual quizzing (please, no more). Jany Green, however, is here to instill some positivity power in the face of short-term setbacks.

Having grown up accustomed to Alaska’s dark and cold clime, it wasn’t until the beatmaker decided to break away from the negative influences surrounding him and make the move to LA that the Jany Green moniker was born. Inspired by the city’s eternal sunshine and laid-back lifestyle, the project took form as a means of expressing his own transition and quickly became an outlet to inspire joy and positivity amongst others.

The project also marked a sonic shift for the LA newcomer as he found the confidence to move beyond the hip-hop and rap he had grown up playing. From the psychedelic rock-inflections on ‘Little’ to the twinkling indie-pop melodies on ‘Suffocate’, Jany Green’s ambition knows no bounds as, in a year doused with loss and despair, he has managed to craft a melting pot of sounds sewed together by his ceaseless energy.

Following the release of infectious new single ‘Move’, NME jumped on Zoom with Jany Green to talk all things OutKast, eternal optimism and life-defining board games.

How did your move to LA inspire this project?

“There was a lot of negative stuff going on back in Alaska that I didn’t want to be around. The music I was making just didn’t make sense to me and I wasn’t enjoying myself. The turning point was when I got to LA and figured out that there is more to life than what I’d been doing. I was in a much more positive mental space and wanted to express that in my music.”

The story behind the Jany Green alias is pretty personal, isn’t it?

“Yeah, my parents played a board game to help them decide what to call me. My dad won so he got to choose the first name and my mum got the middle name. She picked Janal, so I decided to take that and make it Jany, and then Green is her maiden name. I never really had a relationship with my father, so I’m very attached to my mother and have always felt more like a Green.”

Did your mum introduce you to any influential sounds growing up?

“Definitely! She listened to a bit of everything, but OutKast was something big in our family that we would have on to all the time. I love it so much and really try to express that feeling I had from OutKast CD’s in my own music. There’ll always be the artists I grew up listening to, but I’m being inspired by new sounds every day. Dominic Fike is a huge inspiration to me. He played a big part in my decision to reinvent myself and feel OK with the music that I’m making. He gave me the confidence to just do it and not care what anyone thinks.”

You certainly don’t seem afraid to try something new…

“Absolutely! My background in music is mainly hip-hop and rap, but I’ve always dabbled in indie and rock just to try something different. I never really had a producer to execute that before, but luckily, I met Ralph Castelli and we just connected. He comes from an indie background but also loves OutKast, so we just meshed out sounds and came up with this stuff.”

Did you ever feel a pressure to sound a certain way or was it fairly easy to move away from your hip-hop roots?

“I did for sure. It’s not that I didn’t try to before, but it just never made sense. I always felt pressured into doing something different because that’s what I felt like I should be doing or what people wanted to hear from me. Coming out here and changing that felt like something I needed to do. I’m happy and having fun; I think things are working out because I’m not afraid to do it anymore.”

There’s endless positivity in the music – why is that so important to you?

“It just comes naturally to me. 2020 has been super difficult so I just thought it would be awesome to make someone smile and know that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel.”

Your new single ‘Move’ does exactly that. How did it all come together?

“Me and my producer were in a room drinking some beers and listening to music. I remember him playing a beat and I just felt like I had to get up and move. He kept adding bits of sound while I was dancing around, and it all came together. It was just good energy the whole time.”

Jany Green’s new single ‘Move’ is out now

The post Jany Green: LA optimist making sun-drenched sounds for the downtrodden appeared first on NME | Music, Film, TV, Gaming & Pop Culture News.