Father-son design team Mike and Cody Pondsmith reveal the future of iconic RPG Cyberpunk and discuss swapping pixels for paper as they bring video game series The Witcher to the tabletop

Words by Matt Jarvis

Your publishing label, R. Talsorian, has been around for more than three decades now. Could you quickly run us through the company’s history?

Mike Pondsmith: About ‘84 I started a company called R. Talsorian Games, mostly by mistake. I had written a game called Mekton which was the first giant Japanese robot game. We started a game company on $500 and it proceeded to grow. We did Mekton, we did three diTherent versions of that. We moved onto Teenagers from Outer Space and several other games – including the one we known for mostly, which is a game called Cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk has been published in nine diTherent languages now. Turned out, one of the languages it was published in was Polish. This was back during the Iron Curtain days, so I just couldn’t imagine anybody being able to even read Cyberpunk in an Iron Curtain country. But as our friends over at CD Projekt Red [the Polish video game studio behind the Witcher series now developing Cyberpunk 2077, based on the RPG] like to say, ‘We had communism and Cyberpunk‘, so I guess that’s what we gave them.

From there we went on to do Castle Falkenstein and Bubblegum Crisis and a lot of anime games including Dragonball Z, VOTOMS – just basically tons and tons of stuff. At this point it’s kind of a blur.

People don’t necessarily associate you with anime roleplaying games, as much of the attention is focused on Cyberpunk. What do you find so appealing about the anime genre?

MP: We got into it because basically we did Mekton and the Japanese fans liked Mekton so they got in touch with us and we loved the shows. I stumbled onto everything from Gundam to Shirley in-between. So basically it was sort of a natural extension an since we were doing stuff with Japanese companies we ended up doing a lot of Japanese-based games. That’s just basically the proclivity – my wife and I like anime and were big fans at the time. It just kind of meshed in.

What’s interesting is that cyberpunk was actually at that point bigger in Japan than it was in the States. For example, during that same period of time we get things like Akira and a lot of other shows – Bubblegum Crisis was coming out at that point – that were basically already working on a cyberpunk ethos. So it wasn’t a huge jump for us to do cyberpunk at that point. That and the fact that my favourite movie is Blade Runner.

The original Cyberpunk was later retitled to Cyberpunk 2013, while the second edition launched as Cyberpunk 2020…

MP: It’s originally been Cyberpunk, that’s what it’s trademarked for. Then, in addition, it went on. The original took place in 2013 and we added the 2020 essentially as version 20.20, which most people have never actually gotten to guess the joke on. There was an interim version that I never actually published. So that was Cyberpunk 20.20 or 2020, that was because we upped the timeline a little bit so we had a little more breathing room. 2013 was getting a little close.