Cyberpunk is one of those genres I wished had gotten as much play in CRPGs as they did on tabletops. For their part, Interplay went straight to the source with William Gibson's Neuromancer. The result was a sort of cross between a traditional 2D adventure and a CRPG, a year before Sierra's Quest for Glory hit retail.

The game doesn't follow the events of the book, but uses the same setting and some of the characters. In the year of 2058, people plug into the ‘net in a literal sense thanks to a surgically implanted jack in their head transforming all those 0s and 1s into a digital hallucination. And someone or something in there is making all of your friends disappear one by one.

As a cyberspace ‘cowboy' that only has six credits to his name and who spent the last night face down in food he hasn't paid for yet, you'll be pulled into the same mystery – interrogating NPCs for leads and finding ways into places you're not wanted, then eventually hitting the matrix in search of data and the credits for upgrades and connection time.

Skills are learned via chips that can be bought and upgraded the same way software and your cyberdeck can be. Spells are software. Those are used in combat within cyberspace against intrusion countermeasure electronics (ICE) and the occasional AI watchdogs, protecting their fortress of corporate secrets.

One could also sell organs, replacing them with cheap plastic, though don't expect what's left of your meat body to survive more than a minor biofeedback shock in cyberspace. While conceptually interesting, these interactions are when the tone difference stands out. While Neuromancer was a dark, frightening novel, the game takes a tongue-in-cheek approach. No event is more emblematic of this than meeting a sect of Pong worshipers. Yes, the video game.