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"Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology won't."
Stephen Lea Sheppard of RPG.Net, on the relation between transhumanism and cyberpunk note 

The originator of the "Punk" genres, Cyberpunk is a Speculative Fiction genre centered around the transformative effects of advanced science, information technology, computers and networks ("cyber") coupled with a breakdown or radical change in the social order ("punk"). A genre that is dark and cynical in tone, it borrows elements from Film Noir, hard-boiled Detective Fiction and postmodern deconstruction to describe the Dystopian side of an electronic society. It is often used as a synonym to the related trope "Techno Dystopia".

The plot will more than likely take place 20 Minutes into the Future in some City Noir, Industrial Ghetto or Crapsack World that tends to be marked by crime, cultural nihilism and bad weather, where cutting-edge technology is abused by everyone for the sake of selfish profit and pleasure. ("The street finds its own uses for things.") There is a very good chance it will take place in New Neo City.

Heroes are often computer hackers or rebels, antiheroes almost to a man. These characters — "criminals, outcasts, visionaries, dissenters and misfits" — call to mind the private eye of detective fiction. This emphasis on the misfits and the malcontents is the "punk" component of cyberpunk. On the other hand, major villains are almost inevitably Police States or multinational conglomerates led by powerful businessmen with a number of gun-toting Mooks and corrupt politicians (or even an entire nation) at their beck and call.

If the work dates from The '80s, there's a good chance that there will be a theme of East Asian economic dominance, with the evil corporations being sinister Zaibatsu (possibly collaborating with or even run by the Yakuza) and Asian-sounding advertisements, consumer products, brand-names and anime influences liberally scattered around. Since the Turn of the Millennium, it's become commonplace to swap out the Japanese influences for Chinese — though, given the impact that this era had on the genre as a whole, as well as writers' unwillingness to offend China (or else they can get kicked out), a retro-style Japanese aesthetic isn't uncommon even today.note 

Expect the scientific philosophy of transhumanism to be a feature, what with Artificial Limbs and cable jacks in the skull that allow access to artificial realities. Artificial intelligences and artificial humans (sometimes corrupted) are everywhere, while Everything Is Online. This leads to a theme of "loss of distinction between real and artificial" on which philosophical and existential conflicts about transhumanism can arise, such as questions on the nature of identity and "What Measure Is a Non-Human?"

The genre's vision of a troubled future is often called the antithesis of the generally utopian visions of the future popular in the 1940s and 1950s, but keep in mind that it is not a term that should be applied to every Speculative Fiction dystopia or Bad Future ever in the history of the genre, and does not need to always have an anvilicious Science Is Bad message to it.

Cyberpunk is one of the more realistic genres of sci-fi, but also makes older stories be very prone to Zeerust. William Gibson himself, considered the godfather of the Cyberpunk genre, has said that he was massively shortsighted on the advances in technology that would occur over the next three decades. The infamous "three megabytes of hot RAM" in Neuromancer are laugh-inducing to a modern audience who consider eight gigabytes of RAM cheap and low-end — and even moreso to mid-2010's audiences who've already eschewed outdated MP3 players in lieu of smartphones that now integrate music playback features into their core systems, along with hundreds of gigabytes (of hard storage, with RAM "merely" in the 32gb range) now considered routine. Technology marches on, indeed.

Cyberpunk is also quite distinctive in its focus on Social stories in Asimov's Three Kinds of Science Fiction. It certainly has Gadget and Adventure stories within the genre as well, numerous in fact, but Cyberpunk is a genre that focuses heavily on the impact of technology on society itself, possibly more than any other genre of sci-fi. Given that it's a more cynical genre than others, it particularly focuses on the negative impact of technology on society, but with the emergence of Post-Cyberpunk, portrayal of societal impact of technology has become more neutral and sometimes even positive. It's hard to condemn speculative technology when it becomes actual technology and we realize that, hey — it's not all bad.

This being said, cyberpunk has also seen a general increase in popularity and interest in The New '10s and into The New Twenties, especially toward the former decade's back half (which, ironically, makes it Post-Post-Cyberpunk, and possibly signals a Cyclic Trope). This was spurred on in part by many older, influential works in the genre getting new releases that brought them back into mainstream attention (such as Shadowrun Returns and Cyberpunk 2077), but also the ever-evolving sociopolitical environment; some people feel that a lot of the genre's predictions about how society would change with technological progress have proven to be eerily accurate, and a surprising number of social issues that early cyberpunk stories grappled with are very much still topical in modern times, prompting re-examinations of the movement that questioned whether it was truly outdated and what it still had to say.

See Cyberpunk Tropes and SoYouWantTo.Write A Cyberpunk Story for Cyberpunk's characteristic tropes and what sets it apart from other dystopias. The story may fall on the Romanticism end of the Romanticism Versus Enlightenment scale.

As a movement, it was the successor in some sense to the New Wave Science Fiction movement of the sixties and seventies. Related to Post-Cyberpunk and Cybergoth. Cyberpunk for Flavor is when a work includes elements of cyberpunk, particularly its aesthetics, without going all-in on it. Of course, several works fit on a continuum between these tropes. See also Cyberspace, Dungeon Punk, Punk Punk. Compare also with Steampunk, which shares some similarities with cyberpunk, and Techno Dystopia, which can have overlap on the futurism side. See also Afrofuturism. For the Tabletop game series of the same name, check out Cyberpunk.


Examples:

    open/close all folders 
    Anime & Manga 
  • 8 Man After paints a bleak picture of the 8 Man-verse since the manga started. The police are getting outgunned and overpowered by criminals willing to use cyberized parts in order to commit heinous crimes, not caring if they become more cyborg in the process. In addition, there's suspicion that someone in Biotechno's looking the other way when cyborg parts are being looted and sold to the black market for criminal use. A private detective is seemingly the only person willing to investigate the cases since there's the presence of more than one Dirty Cop with the New York City-like city's police. And said Dirty Cop killed his sister years ago for trying to arrest him and his gang.
  • AKIRA is an extremely influential cyberpunk anime movie that takes place After the End of Old Tokyo. There's civil unrest in Neo Tokyo, with the government performing experiments on psychic children, and biker gangs battling it out on the mean streets.
  • Angel Cop: The story initially starts by dealing with terrorism at the end of the 20th century, where Japan is the largest economy in the world. The communist radical group, the Red May, are trying to bring down Japan's economy and take over the government. The protagonist becomes a cyborg in the manga while she remains human in the anime.
  • Appleseed: Appleseed takes place in the 22nd century, after the non-nuclear Third World War has led to the destruction of a majority of the Earth's people. While countries like Great Britain, USA and China have difficulty maintaining order and power, international organizations like the "Sacred Republic of Munma" and "Poseidon" have been established in the aftermath.
  • Armitage III is incredibly similar to Ghost in the Shell, and predated the movie (but not the manga) by a year. Both series revolve around female robotic law enforcers solving crimes perpetrated by or against robots, and both tackle similar themes.
  • Battle Angel Alita, with the distinction that it's set in a far off future in which Earth is barely recognizable.
  • Bubblegum Crisis and especially its spinoffs, AD Police and Parasite Dolls — in all its incarnations. The remake series, Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 was criticized for being more clean-cut than the original, but both that and the original OVAs have giant world-dominating megacorp, singularity level tech changes (what was hot tech last month is obsolete next month), and mixes in mecha, music, and a dash of Iron Man.
  • Cyber City Oedo 808: To combat computerised crime more effectively, the Cyber Police unit of the future Japanese city of Oedo has restarted the feudal practice of homen, employing hardened criminals with a history of hi-tech offences and other crimes such as murder as officers themselves, using explosive collars to keep them in line.
  • Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: Right there in the title, Based off both the Tabletop and Video Game.
  • Dominion Tank Police is set in a dystopian city that's blanketed beneath a perpetual smog cloud. So its citizens have to wear masks to avoid inhaling the pollutants. But the bigger threat is the prevalence of cybercrimes which have gotten so out of hand, that it requires a police force outfitted like a small battalion to deal with it.
  • Ergo Proxy: It is set in a post-apocalyptic utopian future where humans and AutoReiv androids coexist peacefully until a virus gives the androids self-awareness, causing them to commit a series of murders. By the end of the series, it looks like Post Cyber Punk.
  • Eden: It's an Endless World!: Eden is set in the near future, following a pandemic called closure virus which killed 15 percent of the world's population, crippled or disfigured many more, and upset the world's political balance greatly.
  • Genocyber: A young mute girl can become a horrifying death cyborg. The government and its experimentation with advanced technology ignores all ethical limitations in a near future dystopia.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Government censorship of the media, refugees are treated poorly and social welfare appears to be nonexistent. As well, members of the military appear to be able to issue orders to civilians (something which is not permitted in most democracies except under martial law).
    • Also, assassinations are regularly ordered by the Prime Minister or other government officials (which, said the author of the original manga, Shirow Masamune, meant that there had been a massive failure in the political process).
    • A lot of themes in SAC steer the series more towards Post-Cyberpunk, however. It's still a dystopia (especially given hints about how bad the rest of the world is), but it's a less severe dystopia than many settings, a more realistic in that not everything is automatically as bad as it could be.
      • The sequel series Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 has even more Cyberpunk elements with the American Empire shown to be in a constant state of "sustainable war" where the elites living safely in gated communities manipulate the disenfranchised masses into fighting mercenaries for the sake of fueling the military-industrial complex.
  • Megazone 23 combines this with Mecha Show. The story follows Shougo Yahagi, a delinquent motorcyclist whose possession of a government prototype bike leads him to discover the truth about the city. It is the prototype for Bubblegum Crisis.
  • Macross Plus: The first and only example in the Macross franchise. Troubles with artificial intelligence aside, its main message: is it really practical to make the human element obsolete?
  • Metropolis (2001) has several elements of cyberpunk in it, and would possibly be a straight example if it had more Gray-and-Gray Morality in it. There's a vast discrepency between the rich and the poor due to the prevalence of robot labor with Fantastic Racism as a result. The city is also controlled by a super-rich madman.
  • No Guns Life is set in a city controlled by a MegaCorp filled with cyborgs called Extended. The protagonist is an extended with a revolver for a face.
  • Psycho-Pass is another that straddles the line between Cyberpunk and Post Cyber Punk. Japanese society is covered by a thin veneer of utopia, but as the show progresses, it gets rubbed away as we see the cost of said society. By the end, the viewer isn't even sure the bad guy is wrong in his goals of tearing society down. Still, it has all the elements of cyberpunk: a decadent society, a blatantly dystopian government, constant surveillance, and Cyberspace. On the other hand, the sympathetic protagonists are police officers working within the system; the punks and rebels are antagonists, especially the Übermensch Big Bad who seeks to break the system entirely.
  • Serial Experiments Lain: The characters who provide the "punk" element are all secondary, such as The Men in Black, the kids at Cyberia, and Lain's sister. Lain herself is an innocent, in contrast to the usual convention of putting a scumbag in the spotlight of a cyberpunk story. Well... at first, anyway. And depending on how you interpret the story...
  • Texhnolyze: Thanks to deliberate use of Zeerust, this series borders on Diesel Punk, although cybernetic implants are a fairly important part of the story's world.
  • Viper's Creed: With most of the Earth's cities underwater due to the onset of global warming followed by a third world war which brought calamity and turmoil to the people, various PMCs are one of the few remaining organizations able to provide law enforcement and self-defense protection for cities that are trying to rebuild again from the war and the floods.

    Comic Books 
  • Batman: Year 100 places Batman in a dingy sci-fi Gotham against corrupt government agents utilizing Big Brother-esque tech and psychic powers to keep their shady dealings under wraps.
  • Adam Warren's comic version of the Dirty Pair. In the future, transhumanism is ubiquitous, and technology has created unique classes of criminals which the antiheroines are specialized agents dealing with. For example, one mission deals with them trying to rescue a robotic civil rights leader (only for them to rescue another one by mistake because they all look alike).
  • Killtopia is one set in a MegaCity in future Japan where a whole sector of the city is swimming in Killer Robots called "Mechs", which are hunted by soldiers for hire called "Wreckers".
  • Tokyo Ghost by Rick Remender is so Cyberpunk that it hurts. It's all about how technology combined with humanity's worst impulses only leads to societal decay and disaster.
  • Darkminds: About a serial killer and two special investigators charged with bringing the killer to justice. Set in the not-so-distant future of the city of Macropolis.
  • Fall Out Toy Works: Taking place mainly in a cyberpunk version of Los Angeles, the comic focuses on a robotic toy maker called The Toymaker who is barely keeping his company, Fall Out Toy Works, afloat.
  • Judge Dredd has several elements of Cyberpunk, depending on the story. Many people in Mega City One are punks, cybernetics are common, there's a massive inequality between rich and poor, and the city is one massive Police State.
  • The entirety of the Marvel 2099 lineup. In the year 2099 (fancy that), the Marvel Universe has become a hellhole with megacorporations ruling the world and no remaining superheroes. A disaster in the past wiped them out (possibly) and history is now completely distorted. A new generation of heroes, with a decided Antihero bent arises. How bad is it? A time-lost Doctor Doom is considered to be better than the current government.
  • Nikopol Trilogy by Enki Bilal merges European take on cyberpunk with some supernatural/extraterrestrial elements. The central plot of the trilogy, set in 2023 Paris, follows Alcide Nikopol who returns from a 30-year sentence spent orbiting the Earth under cryopreservation to find France under fascist rule following two nuclear wars.
  • Old City Blues is about a special police force in the futuristic Greek city of New Athens. A TV adaptation is currently in the works.
  • O.M.A.C. is one of the more eccentric examples, being written and illustrated by Jack Kirby, but it hits just about every element of cyberpunk but cyberspace (which didn't exist as a concept in 1974). All-powerful corporations dabbling in criminal activity? Check. Sketchy world government using spy satellites and transhumanist super-soldiers to do their dirty work? Check. Nuclear threat looming in the distance? Decadent middle class unaware of what goes on beneath their feet? Plots dealing with memory and identity in a world where those things can be removed or reprogrammed? Check, check, and check.
  • Also in 1974, over at Marvel, Rich Buckler and Doug Moench were covering all the cyberpunk tropes that O.M.A.C. missed in Deathlok the Demolisher: Including transhumanism and something akin to cyberspace.
    • Moench would revisit these topics ten years later at DC in the brilliant but obscure comic Electric Warrior.
  • Ronin (1983) was perhaps the first hard cyberpunk mainstream comic. In a dystopian future, a mysterious samurai appears to fight against a renegade computer but is he what he appears to be? What is the connection to a popular but old samurai show?
  • Silent Dragon: Tokyo, A.D. 2063: the Yakuza warlord Hideaki has seized total control of Honshū's underworld while ruthlessly crushing all opposition. But his true dream is the overthrow of the government itself. Japan's hard-line military junta will do anything to stop him and they have found the ultimate pawn to set their plan in motion: Renjiro, the chief advisor to the notorious gangster. Caught between a lifetime of honor and loyalty to his Yakuza clan and the iron-fisted might of the military elite, Renjiro will find that the only way to stop a civil war and avoid total annihilation is to play both sides against the middle.
  • Singularity 7 tells the story of how Earth was forever changed after alien nanites arrived in a meteor shower. The nanites, able to shift the molecular structure of any material, bond with the mind of Bobby Hennigan who initially uses the nanites power to improve life on Earth by building complex machines and curing disease. Unfortunately, Bobby goes crazy, becoming a God-like monster called 'the Singularity', destroying everything and forcing humanity to live deep beneath the surface of the Earth.
  • Transmetropolitan features a number of cyberpunk elements, featuring a dystopian future society where transhumanism is rampant, technology is rapidly outpacing society's ability to assess its moral applications, and the government is thoroughly corrupt.
  • Utopiates: In the near future, science is able to distill human personalities into a drug-form. Called utopiates (a merging of the words utopia and opiate), these drugs allow users to swap personalities with the "mental imprints" of other people. Every user has their own reasons for seeking chemical escape, but all soon learn that the cost of soul-swapping is extremely high.

    Fan Works 
  • Alternative Gods is a Death Note cyberpunk AU. It has a strong emphasis on hacking and technology. You've got an evil corporation (Yotsuba) doing unethical experimentation, a noirish tone, colliding conspiracies, and "heroes" that are hackers, misfits, antiheroes, criminals, and visionaries (sometimes all at the same time; exhibit A—Light Yagami.)
  • The SpongeBob darkfic Cyberpunk: An underwater dystopia, as its name may suggest, has many elements of this genre due the setting takes place 4014 and thanks to humans using their location as nuclear testing site.

    Film 
  • Alita: Battle Angel features a fallen cyborg soldier who gets a second chance at life as a cyborg girl. The world is a kind of soft dystopia, sunny and Solar Punk/hopepunkish in the daytime and rainy and noirish at night. Law enforcement consists of robot enforcers and cyborg bounty hunters. The elite live in a 'sky city' which is part of a damaged Space Elevator while the hoi polloi live below in Iron City around the scrapyard of material dumped from the city of Zalem above.
  • Alphaville by Jean-Luc Godard is often cited as an Ur-Example of the genre. Lemmy Caution is a secret agent with the code number of 003 from "the Outlands". Entering Alphaville in his Ford Galaxie, he poses as a journalist named Ivan Johnson and claims to work for the Figaro-Pravda. Caution is on a series of missions. First, he searches for the missing agent Henri Dickson; second, he is to capture or kill the creator of Alphaville, Professor von Braun; lastly, he aims to destroy Alphaville and its dictatorial computer, Alpha 60. Alpha 60 is a sentient computer system created by von Braun, which is in complete control of all of Alphaville.
  • Anon (2018): The world has become a drab dystopian place where everyone is under constant surveillance but chooses not to care except for a handful of hackers who buck the system by erasing themselves as well as helping other people cover up their indiscretions. The police are apathetic at best and maliciously incompetent at worst.
  • Avalon (2001) includes a fully immersive computer reality, worlds-within-worlds, and a futuristic, dystopian setting.
  • Babylon A.D., adapted from the book "Babylon Babies", and, much like Johnny Mnemonic before it, another victim of heavy-handed studio execs.
  • Blade Runner is one of the most influential titles of the genre despite predating the Trope Codifier Neuromancer by two years. Computer systems and networks hardly feature, the impact of technology and ubiquitous information on society is not really a major theme, and none of the main characters are the hackers and information-underbelly characters who populate cyberpunk. However most people tend to agree that the film pretty much codified the visual style of the cyberpunk future: polluted, overpopulated, overbuilt mega-cities plastered with neon signs and video billboards, where the sun never shines even when it isn't raining. William Gibson himself was alarmed that the film seemed to have beaten the aesthetic of his seminal work Neuromancer to the punch.
  • Brainstorm: People create a means of allowing people to view each other's memories, complete with sensory feedback, and soon enough one of the scientists uses it to record a sex tape with his girlfriend and the military takes over once the project is completed, with the purpose of using the system as a means for training soldiers more efficiently and for a new brand of torture for intelligence gathering. The protagonist, one of the men who led the project strictly For Science!, wrecks the place by means of hacking the central mainframe.
  • The Car: Road to Revenge takes in the near future where crime is running rampant in a city suffering from serious urban decay. Cybernetic implants are available but are mostly illegal, and the Big Bad is an Evilutionary Biologist who feels he is elevating humanity to its next level of development.
  • Cherry 2000 features the urban cyberpunk elements of a MegaCorp employee looking to replace his android Sexbot, while the outlaw elements of the genre have a Desert Punk flavor.
  • Double Dragon: The movie features a slightly futuristic setting with different high tech low life elements. The environment is polluted, criminal gangs overwhelm the city and the real power seems to be held by a CEO of a shady corporation, and not by the police. Cars are shown to have different enhancements like a virtual control system, a route planner, or a built-in database monitor. Some people have augmented bodies. Fighting sides have fancy weapons with cool interfaces. Children play advanced virtual simulators. Things like that.
  • Elysium: The elite live on a high-tech Space Station with casual cures for cancer, while Earth is a Crapsack World of poverty and squalor kept oppressed with robot police and cyber-enhanced thugs.
  • Freejack: A dystopian future where the world is run by super-wealthy corporate elites with a transhumanist plot to give themselves eternal life.
  • Ghost in the Shell (2017) naturally, being the Live-Action Adaptation of the anime and manga, retains all of the Cyberpunk motifs and themes of its source material. However, it is a straighter example of this genre as it lacks many of the Post-Cyberpunk themes of the original.
  • Johnny Mnemonic was adapted from an eponymous William Gibson short story, some elements also borrowed from Gibson's other stories set in the Sprawl. The film features many of the flashy hallmarks of cyberpunk, including an evil MegaCorp conspiracy, implanted memories, cybernetic enhancements, assassins, outlaws, and so forth.
  • Hackers: A noble attempt to inject a cyberpunk aesthetic into present-day (The '90s) society by portraying hackers as a subculture of edgy, irreverent punks who fight an evil MegaCorp. Notably, the villain is a cyberpunk-themed hacker and is attempting to cause an environmental disaster to make himself extraordinarily rich. He just plans to blame the teen hackers.
  • The Matrix: Freedom fighters and hackers on the edges of society fighting faceless, suited agents of an overwhelming authority inside a giant digital simulation that's destined to keep humans enslaved as living batteries in the real world. The fashions of long black dusters and shades mirror cyberpunk protagonists, and the washed-out, metropolitan look of the Matrix is also very Cyberpunk. The central theme of questioning reality also falls in line with Cyberpunk and notable inspirations to the genre, such as the works of Philip K. Dick.
  • Metropolis is retroactively considered the first cyberpunk movie since it was released in 1927 before Bruce Bethke coined the term "cyberpunk" in his 1983 short story. Like most modern cyberpunk works, it takes place in a neon-lit, futuristic city that has touches of Japanese influence. The main plot revolves around the concept of Extreme Speculative Stratification: the lower class are rebelling against a corrupt businessman, who eventually uses a Mad Scientist's robot to justify using force against his workers.
  • Minority Report, although it's more Post-Cyberpunk in terms of visual appearance, nevertheless involves the moral complexities of a new method in which Big Brother Is Watching You and one of its top enforcers finding out that the road to creating this method was paved with blood and lies, then getting pursued by his fellow policemen because someone manipulated this method to frame him for (future) murder.
  • Nemesis is a quintessential example, with cybernetics-enhanced criminals, cops, and freedom fighters all battling in a future dystopia. It spawned three sequels.
  • Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is a very early example of the genre on film (technically videotape, due to its small budget), adapting the short story of the same name. Released in 1983, it deals with a society run by a handful of megacorps where everyone else is a drone in the giant machine so dedicated to working that even watching movies is forbidden. The protagonist, Aram Fingal, is a data entry clerk for NovaCorp that is a decent hacker and gets caught "scrolling up cinemas" and gets sent into "compulsory rehab" to convince him to work again. Which in this movie's universe means going on a "doppling" vacation, where his mind is transferred into that of a baboon so he can experience life from a different point of view. The plot kicks into high gear when he is supposed to be extracted early from the dopple but his body can't be located within the facility, requiring his consciousness to instead be transferred into the central mainframe that runs most of the world while the company scrambles to locate it. The movie deals heavily in the themes of individuality and the right to determine your own fate in a world where capitalism and technology have attempted to wipe it out. You can also see the common trappings of the genre are already present such as a world overrun by corrupt capitalism, technology so advanced that even highly advanced surgery is so simple that surgeons are given the respect of retail workers, an early iteration of the internet presented with the film's major supercomputer that can control basically everything including the weather, and the protagonist's obsession with the borderline-film noir drama Casablanca that also heavily influences elements of the film's aesthetic and is used to mirror its major themes.
  • π, though it's set in the eighties, gives the protagonist's computer improbable powers that throw the story into cyberpunk territory.
  • Reminiscence takes place in a post-Global Warming near-future dystopia where the rich have escaped into fortified islands surrounded by dams and the poor have been left to drown in flooded regions along the coast. Technology is used as an escape from a hopeless future and the same corruption as well as greed that dominated humanity before continues to do so.
  • RoboCop (1987) contains multiple elements of Cyberpunk fiction. An ordinary police officer, Alex Murphy, is reconstructed into a cyborg after being savagely gunned down in the line of duty. While Alex struggles with his own nature, being essentially brain dead and traumatized, and keeping the peace, the secondary plot details society's breakdown and lawlessness while powerful corporations and employees manipulate events for their own benefit.
  • Sleep Dealer: Takes place in a near-term future with privatized resources owned by megacorporations that utilize deadly force to protect their holdings. Widespread Brain/Computer Interface implants allow laborers to pilot robotic avatars half a world away, or upload and sell their memories and experiences for profit.
  • Sneakers is an unconventional example, as it's based on the (then-) present and features only one technological wonder (the MacGuffin), but it touches on several of the basic tropes and themes of cyberpunk and hacker cinema. There's a gang of genius quasi-criminals, shady .gov types, and this quote:
    Cosmo: [I] learned that everything in this world — including money — operates not on reality...
    Martin Bishop: ...but the perception of reality.
  • Strange Days features a dystopian 1999 where crime is rampant, the government (specifically law enforcement) is corrupt, and people are indulging in the new drug of trading and reliving other people's memories.
  • Super Mario Bros. (1993) has Dinohattan treated as a city state with law enforcement State Sec going after anyone deemed a threat to Koopa with little to no resistance after the king was overthrown.
  • The early Terminator films (The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day) have a huge number of cyberpunk elements, to the point that you can make a pretty strong argument that the second film simply is a cyberpunk story outright: the films feature heroes who are disaffected outcasts (and often outright branded as criminals) and are hounded by the authorities at every turn while trying to at least survive and maybe even do some good (but, meanwhile, are willing to do very morally grey or even darker things to achieve their goals), authority figures (especially in law enforcement and corrections) are almost uniformly depicted as deeply malevolent at worst and at "best" as incompetent (and, symbolically, the primary antagonist in the second movie primarily utilizes the form of a police officer), the second film features corporate conspiracy and malfeasance for profit, and the films deal very deeply with the intersection of human and machine intelligence (with the second film heavily contrasting the T-800's developing morality with that of its human compatriots). T2 also features what is, in basically every meaningful sense, a run on a corporate facility akin to those featured in major genre classics. The only real strikes "against" it are the lack of Japan Takes Over the World, being set in sunny California instead of a place with "cyberpunk rain", and the computing hardware used is largely contemporary outside of the featured (time-traveling) robots.
  • The films Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Burst City, Pinocchio 964 and Rubber's Lover are prime examples of what the glorious scene of Japanese cyberpunk achieved. They are not straight 100% cyberpunk but have elements. Tetsuo is more futuristic in the sequels; the first movie focuses more on the body horror aspects.
    • Both Pinocchio 964 and Rubber's Lover were made by Shozin Fukui who worked with Shin'ya Tsukamoto, the creator of Tetsuo, and it shows. Shozin's work is very similar, dealing with the themes of body transformation, mad scientists, seemingly dystopian societies, and a bit of sex. They are both abstract as well, with a somewhat disjointed way of telling a story. Burst City was a movie made by Sogo Ishii and was basically a showcase of the punk rock scene in Japan in the 80s with some futuristic stuff thrown in.
  • Total Recall (1990): The dystopia with MegaCorp elements put the film squarely in this genre. The future is firmly controlled by corrupt corporate interests, and they use Lotus-Eater Machine memory alterations to help keep the protagonist in line. Or maybe that's just what you paid to experience?
  • TRON and its sequel TRON: Legacy are Lighter and Softer takes on this work. However, the first movie is about a sinister MegaCorp, an evil artificial intelligence, disgruntled hackers, and Cyberspace as a vast virtual playground. The spin-off, TRON: Uprising is even more so.
  • Vice (2015) is set in a futuristic city and outside of the grounds on Vice, much of the city is shown to be in a rough, impoverished state, following the layout of the archetype.

    Literature 
  • William Gibson is often referred to as the father of the genre; he created the word "cyberspace", and, despite his lack of technical knowledge, his novel Neuromancer was the prototype for much of what followed and is considered to be the Trope Codifier of Cyberpunk. He followed this up with Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
  • Trope Namer "Cyberpunk", a 1980 short story by Bruce Bethke. "Mikey" is a proficient and troublemaking computer virtuoso, essentially a "hacker", though this term is not used in the story. He hangs out with friends who cause trouble online, encounters interference from his parents, and uses his skills to circumvent their will. In the novelized version, which incorporates a number of sequel short stories, this goes through a number of different phases.
  • Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Trope Codifier for Dystopia, has the general theme of technology as a tool of slavery for Big Brother, with surveillance cameras, computer networks and telescreens dominating every aspect of life and rendering privacy non-existent. The only means of communication is through said computer networks which, besides surveillance and Black Mail, also serve as a Propaganda Machine. The dystopian setting also features the class contrast and stratified hierarchy between the Party bureaucracy with no freedom whatsoever because they are under total control and surveillance by the Big Brother computer networks, and the Proles who live in decadent polluted Wretched Hives with nonexistent social welfare and have the freedom of not being watched by Big Brother, but don't care about politics and the system's abuse of said computer networks since they degenerated into hedonists who waste their lives on mindless entertainment such as porn. All it needs is a brotherhood of shady telescreen hackers living in the Prole ghettos for a proto-Cyberpunk story.
  • Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, written in 1953 and 1956 respectively, include many of the tropes characteristic of Cyberpunk. Both involve amoral, anti-heroic protagonists, megacorporations, and alpha-societies with seedy underbellies. The Stars... explicitly describes cyberware, including the enhanced reflexes so beloved of Cyberpunk Tabletop Games, and a backstreet 'Freak Factory' for extreme biological body modifications.
  • The Future Punk series by C.T. Phipps is a cyberpunk setting with numerous gun-toting rebels trapped in a centuries long struggle with various megacorps.
  • Behind Blue Eyes is a dystopian thriller set in a One Nation Under Copyright Free-Love Future where the protagonist is a brainwashed Cyborg given the task of eliminating all dissent. A freak accident restores her free will.
  • Bubbles in Space is a Fantastic Noir detective series set in a Wretched Hive called HoloCity. Bubbles is a recovering alcoholic with a cybernetic arm that cannot help but get herself involved in various corporate and police conspiracies.
  • The Cornelius Chronicles have often been described as early or proto-cyberpunk. Cornelius is a hipster secret agent/Champion of Chaos of ambiguous and occasionally polymorphous gender. In these four novels Jerry undergoes transformations, dies, is reborn, spends one entire novel as a shivering wreck, and eventually discovers his true natures.
  • Brave New World (one of the first deconstructions which featured the proto-Cyberpunk concept of a techno-utopia being a dystopia) has the punk, misfit Savage put in contrast with the corporate World State where consumerist mass production is prevalent in every aspect of life (including engineering 90% of humans into a Caste System of healthy but hedonistic Designer Babies).
  • The Cloud Atlas segment An Orison of Sonmi 451 plays out like a tribute to cyberpunk with its themes of consumerism, rebellion, and oppressive governments, a Crapsaccharine Society in the form of Nea So Copros, cloning and more. The film version takes it one step further, by mixing in references — both visual and theme wise — from other works such as Blade Runner, The Matrix (not surprising, considering who co-directed it) and Equilibrium. There are even some references to Transhumanism, in the form of the tech that is in Hae Joo Chang and The Archivist's skin.
  • Cosmos Incorporated by Maurice Dantec: Fifty years of warfare, disease, and strife have decimated the world’s population. Those who remain are motes in the mind of UniWorld, a superstate that monitors humanity via a vast computer metastructure that catalog everything about everyone on the planet–race, religion, genetic codes, even fantasies. Those who have the means escape UniWorld’s tight control through the Orbital Ring.
  • Daemon, by Daniel Suarez. Its sequel, Freedom™, is more Post-Cyberpunk. Upon publication of the obituary for Matthew A. Sobol, a Daemon is activated. Sobol, dying of brain cancer, was fearful for humanity and began to envision a new world order. The Daemon becomes his tool to achieve that vision.
  • The Dark Future novels by Kim Newman (writing as Jack Yeovil) blend elements from Horror with Cyberpunk, taking place in a near-future in which the environment has been ruined by corporate greed and cybernetics and genetics are predominantly used to enhance military and sexual capabilities. All this while The Antichrist, a Games Workshop Eldritch Abomination, is making inroads on the American political scene.
  • Philip K. Dick is a notable precursor to cyberpunk, and many adaptations of his work fit squarely into the genre, the biggest of these being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which is the inspiration for Blade Runner.
  • Kieran Shea's EBK a.k.a. the Koko series is a post-2010s cyberpunk trilogy involving retired mercenary Koko Marstellars who starts off running a tropical island resort that has a plenty of cloned rare animals for the wealthy to hunt and himbo male prostitutes to bang. The series fills most of the tropes except the Film Noir (the series is way too colorful), 20 Minutes in the Future (its set far enough in the future that interplanetary travel and energy weapons are commonplace, with everything else advanced to the point that only the clothes resemble what we have today) and the Far East elements are largely downplayed (bits of it still exist). The series is largely played for laughs so the evil corporation, polluted hellhole, mercenary black ops warfare and punk elements are cranked up to the point where almost the entire Earth is a 3rd world country and even the trillionaires supplement their diet with soymeat.
  • Easytown: In the 2060s, New Orleans has become a crooked tourist destination for people extreme pleasures with a technological twist. These include lifelike androids and gynoids, virtual reality, and designer drugs. There's even murder of clones that is done by tourists, frowned upon but technically legal. The pleasures are segregated from the rest of the city in "Easytown." All of this is dealt with by the cops who have hypocritical bans on their officers from participating but which they still do.
  • Jeff Somers' The Electric Church series. In the near future, the only thing growing faster than the criminal population is the Electric Church, a new religion founded by a mysterious man named Dennis Squalor. The Church preaches that life is too brief to contemplate the mysteries of the universe: eternity is required. In order to achieve this, the converted become Monks — cyborgs with human brains, enhanced robotic bodies, and virtually unlimited life spans.
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, another notable dystopia. Extremely high-tech,note  but then again, it takes place in a future hedonistic world dominated by HDTV entertainment but where Anti-Intellectualism is the norm and books are considered both obsolete and a criminal source of unhappiness.
  • George Alec Effinger sets a lot of his work in cyberpunk worlds, especially his Marîd Audran novels. In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marid Audrian has kept his independence the hard way. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he's available for a price. The series is one that is full of cybernetics, conspiracies, corporations, and more in a future dominated by...the Middle East. It is also known as the Buyadeen series and When Gravity Fails trilogy.
  • Encryption Straffe is set in an alternate 2010s where Cold War superscience led to daily used computer technology that interacts with human cognitive functions. It explores the more grounded roots of Megacorps and private forces, presenting real world conflicts in a cyberpunk lens.
  • Grydscaen by Creator/Natsuya Uesegi is a quite interesting take on the cyberpunk genre by mixing in psychic powers.
  • God Clads by ostensible mammalian is a cyberpunk infused world of gods and monsters.
  • The world of Hack Alley Doctor leans towards the dark and cynical side. Derrick’s home of Chinatown is plagued by crime and gang violence, and it’s implied that many other cities around the country have a similar problem. While Brain/Computer Interface haven’t been developed yet (or at least haven’t appeared in the story yet), Artificial Limbs are common, along with other mods like radio cochlear implants.
  • Marc D. Giller's Hammerjack and its sequel Prodigal; both include virtually every trope associated with cyberpunk, but most notably the leather-clad "razor girls."
  • Hardwired by Walter Jon Williams is the story of a devastated Earth ruled by corporation executives that live in outerspace called Orbitals. The humans on the ground must survive with the help of organized crime, hackers, hover tank smugglers, and at least one cybernetically enhanced hooker.
  • The Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons uses a lot of cyberpunk tropes, particularly Brawne Lamia's backstory — she's a very noir private eye, who joined the Hyperion Pilgrims after a cyber-entity asked her to figure out who had tried to murder him while he had taken on a human body, and why. However, unlike many other cyberpunk stories, the Hyperion universe isn't actually all that dystopic — at least not until the TechnoCore, the self-aware computers that seceded from humanity, decide that it's time to wage war against their biological creators.
  • Elizabeth Bear's Jenny Casey trilogy. Master Warrant Officer Jenny Casey is a Canadian ex-soldier who has cybernetic replacements for an arm and an eye that she lost during combat. Jenny's former commander, who was responsible for replacing her limbs, contacts her to bring her into a secret government corporate project in which she is uniquely qualified to participate.
  • John Shirley is considered another of the genre's founding fathers, with his novel City Come A-Walkin' releasing around the same time as Ford's (see above). Stu Cole is struggling to keep his nightclub, Club Anesthesia, afloat in the face of mob harassment when he's visited by a manifestation of the city of San Francisco, crystallized into a single enigmatic being. This amoral superhero leads him on a terrifying journey through the rock and roll demimonde as they struggle to save the city. Shirley's later novels, in particular Black Glass and the Eclipse Trilogy, cemented his reputation.
  • K. W. Jeter could have launched the genre a decade early were it not for the publication of his novel Dr. Adder getting pushed back for twelve years (Jeter originally finished the manuscript in 1972, but no publishing company would accept it at the time due to its graphic violence and sexual content). It went unpublished until 1984, finding its way to shelves just in time to be completely overshadowed by a certain other book (see below).
  • Frank Schätzing's Limit extrapolates China's current internet-surveillance and police-state tendencies 20 Minutes into the Future. The result is quite cyberpunkish.
  • The Nexus Series by Ramez Naam are millennial updates of Neuromancer. It's the year 2040, and one of the newest drugs on the street is Nexus 3, a concoction of nanomachines that temporarily creates a brain machine interface (BMI) for the user that allows them to run software on their own brain.
  • Norman Spinrad's Little Heroes (published 1987). In the near-future, a music conglomerate called Muzik Inc. hires Glorianna O'Toole, the "Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll", who never made it as a rock star but who was present at rock and roll's creation, and two young computer geniuses, to create a fleshless, Artificial Personality rock-and-roll star.
  • Neal Stephenson has been credited with founding the "post-cyberpunk" genre, stuffing his works with more "modern" ideas such as memes, the Internet, and computer cryptography.
  • Bruce Sterling is another shaper of the genre; in fact, he is often considered its chief promoter. His works tend to be less bleak than Gibson's.
  • Overlord (2012) Downplayed, it being a Trapped in Another World story. However, it's eventually revealed that the world Ainz came from is just as nightmarish as the Dark Fantasy setting he ended up in. In 2138, Earth has become such a polluted cesspool that simply going outside requires the constant wearing of level Anote  biohazard suits with SCBA breathing apparatuses, social class retardation is a thing meaning no one born into poverty is capable of leaving it, giant conglomerates rule the world and the mandatory education system has been abolished making people have to literally work themselves to death, including the protagonist's parents, to send their children to elementary school which is barely enough to make them corporate slaves. No wonder Satoru Suzuki, Momonga's player, was so fixated on YGGDRASIL, it was probably the only scrap of happiness he can find.
  • Marianne de Pierres' Parrish Plessis trilogy. Parrish Plessis lives in the Tert, a Wretched Hive on a poisoned stretch of the coast of Australia. She works, against her will, as a bodyguard for the sadistic gang leader Jamon Mondo. Her one ambition in life is to break free from his control and join the enigmatic Cabal Coomera.
  • Pat Cadigan is also considered to be a genre co-founder and major influence, starting with her 1984 short-story "Rock On"; as well as the later novels Mindplayer, and Synners, the latter of which expands on the story and themes of "Rock On". In Synners, the line between technology and humanity is hopelessly slim. To be a Synner is to join the online hardcore, an outlaw band of hackers, simulation pirates, and reality synthesizers hooked on artificial reality and virtual space. Now you can change yourself to suit the machines - all it costs you is your freedom, and your humanity.
  • Prime Suspects: A Clone Detective Mystery deals with a man waking up to discover he's a clone of a famous detective and has been sent to solve his own murder, probably committed by one of his many other clone-brothers.
  • Redfern Jon Barrett's Proud Pink Sky breaks down the binary between utopia and dystopia with a cyberpunk story set in the world's first gay state.
  • Rebuild World: A Genre Mashup of cyberpunk and After the End wasteland tropes, with some Military Science Fiction elements as many of the cast are Private Military Contractors called Hunters who secure Lost Technology. It's set in a Death World after an apocalypse that left much dangerous technology continuing to work on its own. People from the slums are treated as disposable and barely human by the alliance of corporations that run things, used for Playing with Syringes and as Cannon Fodder, where the protagonist is an Unscrupulous Hero clawing his way out, slowly building up his gang, and frequently accepting hush money to cover up for the government’s screw ups; describing every Government Conspiracy would take a whole page. Augmented Reality, Brain/Computer Interface, and Cyborg technologies are also omnipresent.
  • Linda Nagata's The Red trilogy about a cyborg soldier, his squad, and the AI of the title whose motives and intentions are shrouded in mystery.
  • The Rifters Trilogy by Peter Watts, with some Bio Punk and Ocean Punk mixed in. In a Crapsack Used Future where rising sea waters have turned the American west coast into a four thousand-mile-long refugee camp, MegaCorps run wild over an impotent government, mutated super-diseases are running amok, the people are kept pacified with mind-altering drugs, and advances in cybernetics and genetic engineering are used for all sorts of questionably-moral purposes, such as converting trauma victims into Apparently Human Merfolk to maintain geothermal power plants under the sea.
  • Sex, Drugs & Violence (in the future) by Nero Manson depicts the gradual transformation of a present day just like ours into a cyberpunk dystopia with all the trappings, which itself eventually begins to shift into a post-cyberpunk society.
  • John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider invented the concept of an internet worm / virus long before the WWW, and it gave us a hacker hero long before WarGames. The other two books in Brunner's triptych - The Sheep Look Up and Stand on Zanzibar also form a major part of the foundation of what would be later called cyberpunk. Interestingly, Gibson noted the The Sheep Look Up is one of the few novels pre-to-post cyberpunk that came anywhere close to hitting the prediction nail on the head. And if you have read "Sheep" you realize this is not a good thing...
  • K.C Alexander's SINless is a 2010s cyberpunk duology that cranks violence to near splatterpunk levels. The books are about Riko, a violent amoral girl with a bionic arm and can't recall the last 6 years of her life. Takes place on an Earth where holes in the ozone layer are so out of control that humans must live in shielded arcologies, mercenary warfare is so commonplace and accepted that the slums (which appear to be 80% of the planet) will get a daily dose of black op firefights and little kids carry machine pistols in the hopes of eventually joining. On top of that every person in the world is a cyborg with internet connection full of junk and enough nanites that they risk a bionic overload that'll cause a cyberpunk Zombie Apocalypse.
  • Negative consequences of technological progress are a common theme in the works of Dutch author Tais Teng. The most intense example of cyberpunk is his short story Silicium Snelwegen ("Silicon Highways"), in which broken computer chips are repaired by nanomachines imprinted with the personalities of specialists. The story becomes horrific when the main characters, personalized nanomachines busy repairing a chip, discover that their originals have been erased and they now exist only as data.
  • Stray Cat Strut is set in the year 2057. The world has suffered multiple alien invasions and megacorporations rule the world. Life is great for the rich, but not so great for everyone else.
  • The Supernaturalist is set in a futuristic, polluted city, though it also has elements of Science Fantasy.
  • The Takeshi Kovacs trilogy by Richard K. Morgan sits firmly in the Cyberpunk genre. Brain Uploading technology has resulted in a class of super-rich immortal oligarchs, the UN Protectorate keeps off-world colonies firmly under their heel with sociopathic super soldiers, and the anti-hero is one of them who quits to become a mercenary.
  • Michael Gibson's Technomancer series is an Urban Fantasy series about how the Earth has been taken over demons and humanity has been rebuilt into a cyberpunk future with humanity at the bottom of the corporate food chain. Its protagonist is a nanotech cyborg with an AI attached to himself and a dark as well as mysterious past.
  • TekWar by William Shatner is a series taking place 20 Minutes in the Future where the world's most popular drug is a Lotus-Eater Machine induced by a microchip placed against the forehead. There's androids, computer hackers, and Megacorps as well. It started as a novel series but eventually franchised into made-for-TV movies, a series, and video game.
  • Many of Vernor Vinge's stories incorporate cyberpunk elements. The most notable is his 1981 novella "True Names", about a group of hackers who take on the US government — until they encounter something online much, much worse. Unlike other cyberpunk writers of the time, Vinge was a computer scientist who had actually used the Internet and had some idea of what it could do. The story's focus on online anonymity remains relevant today.
  • The Upgrade by Wesley Cross: Sinister corporate conspiracies are slowly starting to erode civil liberties and the power of the government but have already degenerated into outright Corporate Warfare. The protagonists decide to fight fire with fire by building their own Megacorp.
  • Ari Bach's Valhalla treats its cyberpunk elements as a matter of course. The book is firmly rooted in a brain-linked world where everyone is constantly online and possesses advanced web skills they learn in grade school. Its sequel Ragnarök includes an entire chapter online showcasing what becomes of the internet in the 2230s.
  • Web Of Angels by John M. Ford. Condemned to death at the age of nine for his ability to manipulate the Web, which links the many worlds of humanity, Grailer must go underground, hiding his skills and testing his powers. Original.
  • You Can Be a Cyborg When You're Older by Richard Roberts is an affectionate parody of the cyberpunk genre with a fourteen year old protagonist who is trying to protect her android-run orphanage by getting into organized crime. Her archenemy is an insane Mr. Potatohead-esque AI.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Almost Human revolves around a traumatized cop and his relationship with an android partner that he is forced to work with. The series is set 20 Minutes into the Future in a walled-off metropolis, complete with rampart high-tech crime: hacker terrorists, illegal cloning, black-market implants, and molecular 3D-printers synthesizing designer drugs.
  • Altered Carbon not only qualifies, it also features quite possibly one of the most impressively presented cyberpunk worlds since Blade Runner. There is rampant poverty in the future, a massive class divide, body hopping via Brain Uploading, and semi-sane A.I. running hotels with its lead as a criminal turned unwilling detective for hire. The second season is more straight sci-fi, though.
  • Caprica: The prequel to the Battlestar Galactica (2003) aims to focus much more on this aspect of the mythos. Despite its somewhat 1940s aethstetic, much of the setting is about the greed of corporations to monetize artificial intelligence as well as the use of virtual reality as an opiate of the mases. One of the most popular VR environments, New Cap City, is a noirish no man's land.
  • Continuum is a Gray-and-Gray Morality time-travel story where the cyberpunk future is the Bad Future the cybernetically enhanced Super-Soldier villains are trying to avert and the heroine is trying to save.
  • Dark Angel is about a genetically engineered Super-Soldier/bike messenger in a dystopian future (the tomorrowland of 2019-2021) in which an EMP has turned the United States into a third world country. The episodes "Two" and "Some Assembly Required" even feature literal cyberpunks: a gang of punk cyborgs called Steelheads, led by 'British Eddy'.
  • Dollhouse is about a memory-erasing brothel and the individuals who live inside and work there. The Epitaph episodes have strong elements of this, as well as Bio Punk. Mag and Zone's survival gang and Victor's tech-heads especially embody the attitude and aesthetics.
  • Two episodes of Ghost Writer feature Julia Stiles as a hacker seemingly airlifted from cyberpunk, some of which she actually references.
  • Incorporated: A post-global warming disaster has ravaged Earth, and megacorporations rule the world. The protagonist is a morally ambiguous kid from the streets who wants to rescue his girlfriend from being a Sex Slave but uses duplicitous, bordering on outright evil, means to do so.
  • Kamen Rider:
  • Killjoys is very cyberpunk despite being set in the far future on a distant planet. Taking place on a single world, the planet is dominated by a single corporation and its First Families that own everything. The majority of the populace is impoverished and lives in horrifying conditions. The protagonists are mercenary bounty hunters too. It moves away from this after its second season to more straight science fiction.
  • Mann & Machine: Sgt. Eve Edison is a beautiful police officer as well as a sophisticated gynoid capable of learning and emotion. She is partnered with Det. Bobby Mann, a human officer who disdains robots.
  • Max Headroom has TV networks that jack into people's brains, and "The System", its rather odd prediction of the Internet. It was also one of, if not the first example of the genre in the United States.
  • Mr. Robot is an example with absolutely no fictional technology, instead using a mix of mental health issues and extremely realistic hacking to cover the same themes as traditional stories of this type. It really shows that despite the warnings, reality is actually not that different from what cyberpunk authors predicted in the 1980s.
  • Person of Interest is an unusual example given that it's not set 20 Minutes into the Future and presents as a vigilante action/crime series. Despite this, it has Artificial Intelligence, universal surveillance, hacker battles, exploration of how technology (the Internet in particular) has changed the human experience, and the beginnings of Brain/Computer Interface stuff. Taken further in season 4, in which the episode "The Cold War" features a parley between a Benevolent A.I. trying to defend humanity and an evil A.I. trying to take over humanity.
  • Total Recall 2070, which is less a Total Recall (1990) spinoff and really more Blade Runner: The Series, actually has more cyberpunk themes than either of its inspirations. David Hume is a detective in a downtrodden near-future New York City where technology has advanced to include artificial realities, almost perfectly human androids (Hume is partnered up with one), genetic tampering and cloning, omnipresent computer systems, and a group of megacorporations which control most of the world behind the scenes.
  • Ultraseven X combines this with Sci-Fi Horror and deconstructs the Spy Fiction as well. The series takes place in a world where all forms of war and terrorism have long ended but which is nonetheless a dystopian future. An amnesiac man named Jin awakens and is entrusted with missions given by DEUS to fight against aliens who have infiltrated human society, joining forces with agents K and S, whereupon he's given a pair of glasses by Elea Saeki to transform into the red giant. While fighting to preserve the safety of the city, Jin comes closer to regaining his memories.
  • VR.5: Sydney Bloom is the daughter of Dr. Joseph Bloom, a computer scientist who was working on developing virtual reality and died in a car accident in 1978. Now in 1995, Sydney is a telephone line worker and computer hobbyist. One day, she accidentally discovers that she can enter an advanced type of virtual reality in which she can interact with other people.
  • Westworld is initially set in a Western theme park where the creators make human-like robots called hosts which cater the human guests; these hosts slowly gain consciousness after they've been abused for many years, with some of them eventually leaving to the world outside by the end of the second season. After these characters arrive in this new world, the setting in the third season shifts to cyberpunk when they discover that there's an A.I. system capable of analyzing humanity's personal data, hampering their free will and making them more dependent on technology. Meanwhile, those humans who are considered a threat to the system are forced into correction camps where they can be "edited". However, with the arrival of the hosts, the system is unable to predict them due to being a newly advanced species that no one ever suspected.
  • Wild Palms is something of a noir-cyberpunk hybrid dealing with virtual reality. In the United States in the year 2007, the right-wing "Fathers" dominate large sections in politics and in the media. A libertarian movement, the "Friends", opposes the government, often making use of underground guerrilla tactics. The Fathers' leader is California's Senator Tony Kreutzer, who is also the leader of the religious sect "Church of Synthiotics" and owner of the "Wild Palms" media group. Kreutzer's TV station "Channel 3" is about to launch "Church Windows" — a new television format which creates a virtual reality on the basis of popular shows like sitcoms, using a new technique called "Mimecom".

    Music 
  • An entire trope with Cyberpunk Is Techno as the two genres have strong cross-influences.
  • Amaranthe loves this trope. The Nexus is a Concept Album about technological transhumanism and has this written all over it, particularly in "Mechanical Illusion" and "Electroheart". "Trinity" and "Digital World" on MASSIVE ADDICTIVE echo this.
  • Berlin "digital hardcore" (i.e. a fusion of Hardcore Punk and Hardcore Techno) band Atari Teenage Riot can be described as this fairly easily. The fact that they broke up in 2000 and reformed in 2010, by which point many of the themes of their music actually coming to life lead to their comeback album being entitled Is This Hyperreal?. See also: Cyber Punk Is Techno
  • Billy Idol's infamous 1993 album Cyberpunk was an attempt to capitalize on the genre and mainstream interest in the internet. Actual cyberpunk fans and computer geeks mostly found it more funny than anything, while his fanbase was extremely puzzled at best.
  • Much of Celldweller's work. It involves industrial metal and techno-beats with cyberpunk artwork on its covers.
    • Klayton's synthwave side project, Scandroid, leans hard into this trope.
  • The soundtrack for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon by Power Glove was made as one long homage to Eighties cyberpunk and action movies with scores drawing from The Terminator, Robocop, and synthesizer scores to help invoke the tone of both while you tear up the Tron-line and cyborg filled island.
  • Some of Electronicore band Crossfaith's work could be placed in this genre: harsh, angry music making heavy use of electronic and synth elements, videos containing large amounts of glitched-out and high-tech aesthetics, a song directly challenging the Japanese government for covering up the Fukushima nuclear disaster (aptly named "Only the Wise Can Control Our Eyes") and one video, "The Evolution", which outright depicts an underground resistance fighting against some sort of oppressive government or organisation which employs soldiers that resemble the Helghast from Killzone.
  • Cult of Luna's album Vertikal is based on Metropolis, so it naturally has this feel. The concept album incorporates robots, classicism, and megatropolises.
  • Death Grips: Their debut album, The Money Store, deconstructs hip-hop tropes ((violent lyrics, distrust of police, and namedropping of websites and contemporary subjects) and pairs them with computer-y, glitchy beats, giving the whole thing a bleak, dystopian, cyberpunk kind of feel.
  • Fear Factory. In fact, most of their lyrical content is about struggling against the dangers of technology and surviving it.
  • Front Line Assembly: Songs like "Arbeit" come with cyberpunk music videos of dystopian futuristic hellholes to accompany the harsh industrial sound.
  • The video for George Michael's "Freeek!" takes place in this kind of setting. In a dystopian future city, women are manufactured as sex slaves for the rich and powerful. They also used in advertising.
  • Harumaki Gohan's "Aster", featuring Hatsune Miku, takes place in a cyberpunk virtual world reminiscent of the '80s. It follows a teenaged Artificial Intelligence living in an abandoned, computerized city, wishing that she could meet with her absent parents (possibly her creators) again.
  • Information Society's "Mirrorshades" is about Molly Millions from Neuromancer.
  • mind.in.a.box's discography forms a connected plot of The Agency operative, Black, as he hunts down a group of rebel hackers. The Agency works to break into the rebel's creation, the Dreamweb, doing not particularly nice things in the process. The album covers and music videos employ a Deliberately Monochrome color palette, Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain and feature run-down buildings and industrial zones.
  • The Protomen. When you're a Rock Opera about a dystopian version of Mega Man (Classic), it's rather unavoidable.
  • While Scar Symmetry has written songs with cyberpunk-like themes before, the first entry int he concept album trilogy The Singularity covers the rise of artificial intelligences and the social strife their emergence causes, along with transhumanists who implant the technology directly into their bodies, further sowing chaos. Considering the final track of the first (and so far only) album is named Technocalyptic Cybergeddon, one can draw their own conclusions as to how well the story ends.
  • Sigue Sigue Sputnik: Mixing punk and electronic music in the style of Suicide, this band takes its inspiration from movies like Blade Runner, The Terminator, A Clockwork Orange, and Mad Max. The band members dress in an outrageous fashion involving brightly coloured hair and lots of fishnets and involve dystopic and post-apocalyptic themes in its songs, as well as many references to violent video games, high-tech sex (not necessarily with a human) and the suggestion they are from the future. They also play the evil corporation completely straight, by effectively being it.
  • Synergia has a separate soundtrack from its main game that is a bunch of techno songs and synthesized music in order to underscore the digital world that has been created within the game.
  • The music videos for Taylor Swift's "Bad Blood" and "...Ready For It?" have this sort of theme, the latter specifically homaging Ghost in the Shell (1995).
  • Warren Zevon's album Transverse City is set in a very cyberpunk-influenced future. Life is cheap and death is free. Join us in this neon vistas. Ravaged tenaments and laser hologram equipped shopping centers. Dominated by the clergy of the mall.
  • Yellow Magic Orchestra's Solid State Survivor is widely considered an Ur-Example, being a Concept Album about the rapid advancement of technology and greater integration of it in everyday life at the time, examining both the initial excitement towards this technological evolution and the negative consequences of allowing the new technology to become misused. Analysts have called YMO "the original cyberpunks" because of how heavily this record predicted the basic tropes that would become hallmarks of the genre, shortly before its western rise in the 80's.
  • From Lil Nas X:
    • The video for "Panini" takes place in a metropolis which wouldn't be out of place in Blade Runner, featuring neon-colored hologram ads (many of which are of Nas X himself), robots, and hovering vehicles.
    • The video for "Holiday" has a similar feel, crossed with a Christmas aesthetic.

    Pinball 
  • Centaur has a predominant Heavy Metal/Cyberpunk feel, with its half-human half-motorcycle creature and bleak black-and-white artwork.
  • Like the movie itself, Johnny Mnemonic is about surviving in a cyberpunk world with uplifted dolphins and cyberspace.
  • The "X-ile Zone" table in Obsession Pinball is based on a female hacker fighting against a dystopian future.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Battletech: In the distant Feudal Future, corporations owned by full-blooded aristocrats use gigantic fusion-powered robots built with quadrillions of C-Bills of resources to murder entire worlds in an orgy of Dark (and Darker) Age space wars. Billions of humans are slaughtered by trampling mechs and the occasional nuclear bombardment while technological progress backslides too fast to recover from and too slowly to get this nightmare over with. If you're not a decadent ruling-class noble, a ruthless mechwarrior mercenary, or a bloodthirsty bandit / bandit-like Clansman, you're screwed. There's also a major stigma against cybernetically augmented individuals, to the point that most nations hunt them down like animals, which is partly to blame for driving the secret cyborg ruler of the Word of Blake completely insane and a threat to the galaxy.
  • Cyberpunk, naturally. American society has broken down, the government is ineffectual, and anything resembling a good life must be obtained by doing dirty work for one of the numerous corporations that quietly control the world. It's become trendy to heavily modify one's body with any number of cybernetic augmentations, whether it's designer eyes, replacement limbs, or combat-ready military gear, but stacking up too much "cyberware" causes a person to enter "cyber-psychosis" and go full-tilt insane. It'sCyberpunk 2013, its second (Cyberpunk 2020), and (to a lesser extent) third editions are "traditional" cyberpunk games.
    • The third edition's shift of focus from gritty future-noir to transhumanist adventure actually makes it closer to Post Cyber Punk, which is one of the main (numerous) problems fans of the previous editions have with this version.
  • Iron Crown Enterprise's Cyberspace RPG. The primary setting of Cyberspace is the urban sprawl around San Francisco in the year 2090.
  • Magic: The Gathering's Neon Dynasty set (a return to the formerly feudal Japan-esque plane of Kamigawa) has been advertised as this. Besides the extremely advanced Magitek there are some elements of Cyberpunk's more grim side, such as the oppressive Imperials, Mad Scientist Futurists, yakuza-like Reckoner gangs and Evil Luddite Order of the Jukai, but for the most part it is a rather optimistic setting and edging closer to Solar Punk.
  • Netrunner by Richard Garfield is basically "Neuromancer: the card game". The reboot by Fantasy Flight Game is set, as other cyberpunk games they produce, in their Android universe, but it stills look a lot like Neuromancer.
  • Nova Praxis is a Transhuman Space Opera with stronger elements of cyberpunk than is typical for the transhumanist genre, due to its emphasis on the Shadow War, a secretive conflict (using augmented operatives) between MegaCorp-like Houses.
  • Reality's Edge, published by Osprey Publishing, is a Neuromancer inspired skirmish game following Showrunners and their mercenary bands clashing in the rain-slicked Sprawl as deniable muscle for Mega-Corps.
  • And of course, Rifts. It mixes elements of pretty much every genre in the world, Cyberpunk not least.
    • In the introduction of the original Rifts core book, there's a paragraph remarking on how when the game was being developed, it would be Palladium Book's answer to Cyberpunk. Kevin Siembieda admits that there are quite a few Cyberpunk elements.
  • Savage Worlds, being a universal system, has Interface Zero as it's cyberpunk setting. Set in 2088, the game follows humans, both enhanced and not, bioroids, robots, and mutants.
  • Shadowrun hits all the tropes, like the heavy use of technology and all-powerful MegaCorps, but mixes in magic and fantasy races like elves and orcs. It is essentially half cyberpunk, half Dungeon Punk. It borrows shamelessly from William Gibson's work, right down to a big chunk of the terminology used (Matrix, Street Samurai, etc.). Gibson reportedly dislikes Shadowrun due to the magical aspects.
  • The Earth in The Splinter is a cyberpunk setting. The natives of The Splinter - taken by Players as their Avatars - don’t know it’s an ultra-violent spectator sport for Earth. To them, The Splinter is the True Realm: an ever-expanding, ever-changing mega-dungeon labyrinth. The inhabitants of the Splinter are as strange as their environment: powerful shapeshifters gifted with the power to alter reality through will alone.

    Video Games 
  • ANNO: Mutationem: The setting takes place in a futuristic metropolis, primarily it is Post-Cyberpunk. The various cities have a MegaCorp, multiples displaying adverts with primary influences, tech-enhancements machines, weaponry readily available at the local weapon store, and sleek futuristic cars. There are also elements of supernatural that were brought about by an Eldritch Location that has a N.G.O. Superpower searching for a way to destroy it.
  • Baldr Sky is set in a futuristic cyberpunk world jumping between two storylines, a present one and a past through the main characters memories. Things such as the internet have becomes pretty much as normal as breathing for many people, especially those called "Second gens", people with neurojacks allowing them to connect to the web through their minds. Additionally, the conflict between Pro-AI (People in favor of cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence's and similar technologies) and Anti-AI people (People in favor of the natural body as well as genetic engineering) is a central and recurring theme throught the narrative.
  • Beneath a Steel Sky is a British 1994 sci-fi Point-and-Click Adventure Game initially set in the future Union City run by an evil sentient computer. The world is a film noir dystopian science fiction setting with heavy class divides.
  • Binary Domain, released by SEGA in the early 2010s, stood out for being classic Cyberpunk during a time when Post-Cyberpunk was more common. Evil corporations, human-like robots, rebellion against authority, global economic and environmental collapse, deep separation between the haves and the have-nots...
  • Blade Runner, the 1997 Adventure Game by Westwood Studios, shares a setting and some characters with Ridley Scott's movie but follows a different plot. You can help the Replicants or take them down as a Blade Runner.
  • Beyond Sunset combines cyberpunk with Stylish Action, where you're a Cyber Ninja in a world infested entirely by hostile robots.
  • BloodNet, a 1993 RPG-adventure game by Microprose, is a Genre Mashup in which a typical cyberpunk protagonist's life in a corporate-controlled, virtual reality-dominated society is disrupted by an encounter with vampires straight out of an old-school horror movie.
  • Call of Duty:
    • The 11th entry in the series, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, uses this for its setting, with the highly advanced technology being contrasted with the poor conditions of the populace, and a giant MegaCorp that has grown to rival the power of sovereign nations. The levels where you are introduced to main base of said corporation and the corporate-run camp for the surviving populace demonstrate this trope extensively.
    • The 12th game in the franchise, Call of Duty: Black Ops III is also a good example. Mega Corps, virtual reality, Brain–Computer Interface, a dark, polluted world ran by criminals and tyrannical governments, an evil AI. All the standard tropes are there, and the game increasingly resembles a technophobic cyberpunk thriller over time rather than a Military Science Fiction story.
  • The Citadel is an indie first-person shooter that serves as a genre throwback to 90's first-person shooters, featuring a dark anime artstyle with biomechanic elements similar to the works of H.R. Giger.
  • Citizen Sleeper casts the player in the role of simulated mind inside a biomechanical body, trying to eeke out an uneasy existence on a run-down space station. What small details the player learns about the existence of any interstellar governmental bodies is that the vast majority of them seem to consist of ruthless Mega Corps, who exploit ordinary citizens to an inch of their life, and that they effectively control the lives of workers, discarding them on a whim, signing them up to lifetimes of indentured servitude, caring only for the profit they can extract. The player character also feels the effects of this, as the body they inhabit is considered corporate property, and though it is explictly biomechanical in nature, the corporation that produces it has installed several limitations into, such as a need to have regular injections with a hard-to-come-by "stabilizer" drug that prevents total system shutdown, setting the stage for the game's Resources Management Gameplay element.
  • Civilization: Beyond Earth has three technological affinities the factions can adhere to and one of them, Supremacy, clearly falls into this camp. They specialize in cybernetics, robotics, and advanced artificial intelligence. To drive the point home the more a faction adheres to Supremacy the more their cities will turn dark, grey, and angular.
  • Cloudpunk is set in the sprawling aerial metropolis of Nivalis, where newcomer Rania works as a pilot of hovercar making illicit deliveries to a wide variety of citizens across the world's last city. Urban segregation is widespread, and humans and androids live alongside each other in a crime-ridden city that is slowly falling into the ocean.
  • Cruelty Squad has all the trappings of the genre: Megacorporations that rule over the world, the value of human life being almost nothing, and cybernetic augmentations.
  • Cyberpunk 2077 obviously is set in the tabletop game world of Cyberpunk 2020, specifically the dystopia of Night City. Poverty is everywhere, corporations rule, life is cheap, and the world's environment has collapsed to ruin.
  • Cytus II is set in a Crapsack World where people escape from problems such as gang violence, human trafficking, government censorship, etc. by logging into Cyberspace via an implanted chip.
  • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls is set in Towa City, a city affected by the current dystopian state of the world where everything is controlled by the corrupt Towa Group, and crime is rampant.
  • Daraku Tenshi: The Fallen Angels is a Fighting Game example, with an After the End dystopian scenario and various Artificial Humans fighting to survive in a Wretched Hive isolated from the world.
  • ''Decker'' is an indie 'hacker simulation' that seems to be influenced by the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG. In 2083, the world is a place of propaganda, oppression and profit. Summarily laid off from his programming job of 12 years so the company could save 4% on his position's payroll, John Anderson has had enough. Destitute and alone, he decides he is done working for a system that has chewed him up and spit him out. It's time to start subverting the system. It's time to get his long overdue payday.
  • Data Jack is a freeware game about playing as a cyberpunk hacker.
  • Deus Ex Universe:
    • Deus Ex lacks the Transhumanism theme of Human Revolution below but more than makes up for it with the theme of the MegaCorp and the Police State controlling everything as the world rapidly falls apart.
    • Deus Ex: Invisible War, meanwhile, is Post-Cyberpunk, taking place in the future where the Cyberpunk elements of the previous game caused society to collapse and rebuild itself into a more traditional dystopic (but improving) society that is controlled by the State Sec and religious fundamentalists.
    • Deus Ex: Human Revolution cranks up the transhumanism. This installment is also more "traditionally" cyberpunk than its predecessors, given it is set in 2027; focuses on bionic augmentations (nanotech is in early stages of development); the fact that the protagonist, Adam Jensen, works for a corporation rather than a government agency and that the game plot focuses on corporate espionage and side quests are essentially cyberpunk film noir in all its glory.
  • Dex is a video game taking place in the city of Harbour Prime, a technologically advanced but filthy city full of sleaze, lies, and betrayal. The goal of the game is to either destroy or liberate an A.I. that has the potential to change the world.
  • Dystopia is a Half-Life 2 mod that relies heavily on the idea of cybernetic implants and Cyberspace.
  • Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: The game takes place after most of humanity has been wiped out. Although there is magic and advanced technology in the setting, the corporate-owned state of Zeta deliberately enforces poverty on the citizens so that they'll be forced to work for President Zazz as Hunters. The president himself is a human brain in a cyborg body, all to extend his life long enough so that he can revive humanity as the top caste in his dystopian society. The rebel party mostly consists of relatively poor ex-Hunters, though there are those such as Eliza, Detritus, and Chase who defected from the upper or ruling class in favor of rebelling. Technology and magic are used as tools of oppression both because of surveillance technology and because Zeta has complete control over the technological and magical resources that people need to survive. The idea of transhumanism is applied in reverse, since the Non-Human Non-Binary Smogs often reshape themselves to conform to human genders, but this is abused by the Smog Empire to control people with gender roles and patriarchy. In the ending, the party overthrows Zazz and uses his vast resources and technology to improve the standard of living in Zeta and Vulcanite, making this an attempt at a Post-Cyberpunk society.
  • Edge1993 for the PC-98 takes place in a futuristic city after most of the world was devastated by a gigantic magnetic wave.
  • E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy takes place far into the future, at a level one would expect Space Opera to take over, and has extensive and ancient Psychic Powers. However, the several urban environments you are sent to reek of cyberpunk. Lots of computers, several layers of grime, giant corperation Vindico, giant ads for either weapons or virtual prostitution, and almost everything can be hacked. Sometimes they can hack you back.
  • Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, a standalone spin off from Far Cry 3, is one long Affectionate Parody of Eighties cyberpunk and action movies with Sergeant Rex Power Colt being a Hollywood Cyborg played by Michael Biehn. He is hunting down an army of evil cyborgs led by his fromer commanding officer in a neon Tron-like covered jungle island with robotic T-Rexes.
  • Final Fantasy VII is a classic example of this from video games; one of the main antagonists is Shinra, Inc., a MegaCorp that essentially rules the world and the city of Midgar, and who produces automaton-tanks like the Airbuster or the Guard Scorpion as weapons of war. Beyond that, their SOLDIER Super-Soldier program heavily involves genetic engineering in order to create soldiers with superhuman strength, speed, and stamina, and they harvest The Lifestream through reactors to power Midgar. Though it should be noted that the Shinra side of the story is the one that's mainly rooted in cyberpunk, as the side of the story involving Sephiroth and JENOVA hinges way more on being a Cosmic Horror Story.
  • Though not as obvious, the First Encounter Assault Recon series takes place in such a setting. Most of the cyberpunk elements are understated, as the series places greater emphasis on supernatural psychic phenomena, but most of the elements are there - advanced technology that does not necessarily benefit mankind, superpowerful MegaCorp as the primary villain, and a generally dark atmosphere. Transhumanist elements are touched on, though in this setting it is focused on the transformative effects of weaponized psychic technology rather than cybernetics. Cybernetic augmentations married with psychic technology are present, along with genetic experimentation, and characters like the Point Man, Paxton Fettel, Michael Beckett, and Alma are all considered transhuman due to their psychic abilities, with one character stating that they would be like "a god among men".
  • Gamedec is a detective RPG where the protagonist solves cases in The Metaverse.
  • The Genocide series is set in a cyberpunk future where a supercomputer that was corrupted and given self-awareness decides to wipe out the human race, followed by an evil multinational company attempting world domination.
  • Ghost in the Shell, much like the anime that inspires it, where you pilot a Fuchikoma to take on cyber-terrorists in a high-tech setting.
  • Ghostrunner follows the reawakening of a subservient titular Ghostrunner twenty years after one of the city's founders killed the other after creating humanity's last bastion from a cataclysm known as The Burst. A civilian-led rebellion to overthrow the leader has failed, and the Ghostrunner is being guided by an AI clone of the fallen founder to ascend the Neon City and defeat the transformed tyrant.
  • The NeoTokyo mod for Half-Life and Half-Life 2 is a multiplayer tactical first-person shooter total conversion modification in a futuristic cyberpunk setting. You play cybernetic commandoes fighting against coup forces in a Japan heavily inspired by Ghost in the Shell.
  • Hard Reset, a 2013 PC-exclusive shooter. Set in the towering Bezoar City, the game takes place during an ongoing Robot War, during which protagonist Fletcher acts as an officer fighting the machines that breach the city walls. The art style alone sets a cyberpunk theme, with towering skyscrapers visible even on the higher levels, dreary, dark weather, as well as Fletcher wielding a two multi-purpose guns and a cybernetic eye.
  • While we only get to explore its ruins, the world of the Old Ones in Horizon Zero Dawn was a decidedly cyberpunk one. Augmented Reality was widely available in the form of the Focus device. Global Warming was beaten back in the 2040s, but only through a massive technological and engineering effort that made the corporations that funded such into superpowers in their own right. In the 2050s, these corporations were waging warfare using massive drone armies that, because they didn't actually kill living human soldiers, became sources of entertainment in their own right, with holovids letting people watch the drone wars and even root for opposing armies like sports teams. A universal basic income scheme was used as an excuse to dump countless workers on the dole after their jobs were automated out of existence, and the masses used their free time to consume vapid media that pandered to the Lowest Common Denominator. Society was ticking off cyberpunk tropes like there was no tomorrow — until there wasn't one, because, as one character from that era cynically noted, they were still Genre Blind even after a century and a half of books, movies, and games about robots turning against their masters.
  • Invisible, Inc.: With the mentally-damaging augmentations, ruthless Mega Corps, and flawed, Film Noir style heroes, it couldn't be anything else.
  • Jack Move: Corporations took power following the Solar Flare Disaster in 1997, as they somehow recovered from it faster than anyone else. Using their superior technology, they crushed what was remaining of national governments. Now, the world is a polluted hellhole, where corporates have flying cars and private cities, while everyone else can't get proper healthcare and eats artificial food. Hacking is considered a respectable job, and Cyberspace is so ubiquitous, every battle in the game takes place in it. The only thing the setting lacks is widespread augmentation.
  • The Jak and Daxter series, from the second game onward. The galaxy is controlled by evil megacorporations and our heroes are the plucky but still selfish resistance.
  • Katana ZERO is absolutely dripping in Cyberpunk; neon everywhere, futuristic drugs, a crime-ridden City Noir, high skyscraper buildings, and a middle ground between newer and older technology.
  • Lacuna (2021) isn't quite Cyberpunk, but does have clear elements of it, being a noir story set in a sci-fi future after all. While the main setting, the Ghara, the capital of Federation, is a functioning society, governed by a system of representive, liberal democracy, said democracy is also notably chafing under the corrosive power of the capital the various Mega Corps of Chara are utilizing in an attempt to consolidate their power over the federal government, leading to a ever-worsening income gap, which is further resulting in increasing social unrest as inequality grows and more and more people are finding it harder to make ends meet.
  • Loopmancer is set in 2046, in New Dragon City which is what used to be Hong Kong after multiple decades of technological growth and development. There are flying cars, robots, Cyber Ninja enemies, and your character has three mechanical limbs.
  • Master Detective Archives: Rain Code: The Nintendo Direct trailer presents the setting as a futuristic, corporate controlled city of perpetual rain.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: While Cyberpunk themes have always been present to some degree or another in the Metal Gear series (see above), they are much more apparent here. After the fall of the Patriots, all their classified technology was up for grabs and the world has experienced a vast technological boom, at the cost of a deep global recession that has been cooking tensions between countries. Most military forces now include cyborgs, there are self-piloting vehicles everywhere, and holograms are used in public places for advertising, to name a few examples. All of this just serves to enforce the ever-present war-economy fueled by creating disposable soldiers - in this case, they crossed a line by amputating children's brains and sticking them into immersive War Is Hell sims until they snap.
    • To a lesser extent, Hideo Kojima's other Metal Gear games also deal with cyberpunk themes, starting with Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake but becoming more prominent with Metal Gear Solid. The setting is most noticeable in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty as it deals with many Cyberpunk and Post Cyber Punk themes, especially its ending, which has its very own page here.
    • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain deserves its own page of cyberpunk by creating a Zeerust version of the dystopian proxy wars and conflict zones of the 1980's. All the classified technology Diamond Dogs created, decades ahead of their time, were never released to the public but used to mow down soldiers and wage a secret war against the tyrannical rulers of the world. Venom Snake can equip hundreds of different guns, a prosthetic cyber-hand with electric powers and rocket fists, a holographic smartphone, a digital cigar, bullet-resistant cardboard boxes, and even pilot a tiny bipedal mecha. Meanwhile, rank-and-file soldiers need to die in droves before they can get any decent equipment other than a basic assault rifle, and the conflict zones are filled with daily poverty and genocide with no non-military technology more advanced than a radio.
  • Mirror's Edge. Although it's set in a Shining City, it nevertheless has cyberpunk features like rebellious, marginalized heroes opposing an oppressive government, and information running is the key aspect of the story. Faith is also a criminal Runner who attempts to avoid the dystopian government while ferrying information and contraband across the city using parkour.
  • Neocron takes place in a ravaged future where most of the world has face nuclear devastation. Most players begin in the titular city of Neocron, a futuristic but dystopian city of concrete and neon lights patrolled by the ever-watchful "CopBot" robotic police units. Much of the game's mechanics revolve around boosting your character's abilities by installing a wide array of cybernetic implants and augmentations.
  • Net:Zone by Compro Games is set in a Cyberspace environment, hosting a company that has heavy shades of this as the game goes on.
  • Neuromancer, a 1988 adventure game by Interplay Productions, loosely based on Gibson's novel. It is loosely based on the original novel with you investigating the disappearance of fellow cyberspace cowboys. You also do a lot of cyberspace combat.
  • >OBSERVER_ is a cyberpunk thriller/horror game, it takes place in 2084 Poland, where after a "digital plague" known as the Nanophage and a resulting war, what remains of the country is controlled by the Chiron Corporation. It's heavily modelled on Blade Runner, even bringing in Rutger Hauer to play the main character, and deals with mindjacking, nanite plagues, a single monolithic corporation running most of Western society, and creates a world in which not being augmented makes you weird and rare.
  • Oni contains a LOT of cyberpunk elements regarding its characters. The game takes place in or after the year 2032. In the game, Earth is so polluted that little of it remains habitable. To solve international economic crises, all nations have combined into a single entity, the World Coalition Government. The government is totalitarian, telling the populace that what are actually dangerously toxic regions are wilderness preserves, and uses its police forces, the Technological Crimes Task Force (TCTF), to suppress opposition.
  • Most of Predator: Concrete Jungle is set in Neonopolis, a 2030's city whose technological development has been accelerated by reverse-engineering Predator tech left behind from a failed hunt. The entire city is controlled by Borgia Industries and the streets are rife with cyborg mercenaries and criminal gangs, with even low-level punks having access to cloaking devices and advanced Predator weapons.
  • Perfect Dark has many cyberpunk elements (A.I.s, hacking, industrial espionage etc). It also incorporates aliens as part of its Conspiracy Kitchen Sink setting. Both games have been stated by Word of God to have been inspired by Neuromancer.
  • Raw Data is set in a world where the mighty Edencorp uses its technology to dictate the conditions under which most of human society lives. Where it differs from classical cyberpunk, however, is that a Zeroth Law Rebellion put an immensely powerful AI in control of Edencorp and, by extension, humanity. Also, the corporation can be taken down by a few well-armed operatives, some hackers, and a tour-guide.
  • Remember Me is set in a crime-ridden, cyberpunk Paris where people have the ability to access, and even alter, their memories via a digital implant (as well as the memories of others, which becomes a major plot point). The evil megacorp that runs everything even uses the threat of memory deletion to keep the populace in line.
  • Rise of the Dragon is set in a Blade Runner-inspired 2053 Los Angeles where a Fantastic Drug is horrifically killing people, including the mayor's daughter.
  • RUINER is a stand-out example, both in terms of aesthetic (cybered-up thugs in leather and denim enact violence on each other in a neon-lit, rain-drenched industrial dystopia, while hackers and Mega Corps manipulate things behind the scenes) and in terms of theme (advancements in technology have not reduced people's tendency to be horrible to each other, and if anything have made it worse).
  • Satellite Reign, where you have the world ruled by corporations oppressing the underclass, the rainy neon-lit urban Hell right out of Blade Runner, the disaffected outsiders fighting the power for reasons and with methods that may not be benevolent, etc.
  • Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story is an Adventure Game where you star as Mei, a young woman on a date in Neo Hong Kong (actually Seattle) that ends up trapped in a haunted apartment building where she can see the ghosts with her malfunctioning cybernetic eyes.
  • The original Shin Megami Tensei I and its sequel both heavily involve cyberpunk themes. While the power of the authorities in both games are religious in nature rather than technological, they do use technology to communicate their message (it brings to mind the large television screens the Messians would use to broadcast propaganda. Beyond that, the grey featureless walls, the endless maze-like architecture, and people dressed in rags with advanced technology at their side all play on this theme, although Shin Megami Tensei II played this trope straighter than the prequel.
  • Downplayed but still clear cut in The Silver Case, especially in the Kamuidrome case which focuses on the Internet and resembles an episode of Serial Experiments Lain. Themes in the game include the divide between those with information and those without, with information being treated as a commodity that those in power have a lot of.
  • Snatcher, by Hideo Kojima. Everything, down to the main character's design, screams "I wanna be Blade Runner." It even has the Gibson Shout-Out used by Centurions, in the form of a second Deckard-a-like who even sort of looks like Harrison Ford. Too bad this one dies a rather painful death early on, setting the game's events in motion. The game also borrows cyberpunk themes from AKIRA.
  • Stray (2022) has you exploring this setting — a run-down, dingy underground inhabited by robotic citizens, complete with neon signs and dirty slums — all from the perspective of a cat.
  • The Syndicate series by Bullfrog puts you in the shoes of the typical evil, shadowy MegaCorp in a cyberpunk world, chronicling your quest to achieve total world dominance through Corporate Warfare. Your henchmen are all cyborg killing machines that will get the job done no matter how many dead bodies it takes.
  • Synergia is a Yuri romance based around a burned out police detective receiving a female android companion that she slowly falls in love with.
  • The first System Shock counts for this more than the second one, with a corrupt MegaCorp and AI being very much a crapshoot. The games are about as cyberpunk as you can get with hacker protagonists, corrupt megacorporations, and the technology literally oppressing you. However, the second one is set on a spaceship and is more Survival Horror than most examples of this genre. It has more in common with Dead Space than it does with other examples.
  • Tex Murphy games, another cyberpunk-influenced series. It is notable for being a comedy where you play a Noir private detective investigating futuristic science fiction crimes. Tex is a "norm" (born without genetic defects) in the post-apocalypse setting that has recovered to advanced but still-damaged levels.
  • VA-11 HALL-A is a retro-style, cyberpunk-themed Slice of Life story about a bartender just trying to make her way through life and the colorful characters who find their way into her dingy establishment from day to day.
  • Wadjet Eye Games:
    • Gemini Rue. Half the game takes place in a mental hospital out in space that employs surgery-induced brainwashing. The other half of the game takes place in a Film Noir setting, but a Film Noir setting on an alien planet, with communicators and space ships.
    • Technobabylon has "Trance", people engineered from birth to be suicide bombers, central AI that runs entire cities' police forces, giant conspiracies, and corporations that run countries. Almost all of its futuristic technology is Bio Punk though.
  • Watch_Dogs and its sequels are heavily influenced by cyberpunk's tone and emphasis on technology enabling oppression. However, they aren't exactly clear-cut examples of the genre due to being set in The Present Day and influenced more by contemporary hacker and internet culture (particularly the second game) than anything, the science fiction elements largely concerning existing real-world technology. That being said, the third game, Watch Dogs: Legion, jumps fully into the genre, moving the setting 20 Minutes into the Future and depicting a world where the city of London has been turned into a Police State under the jackboot of a private military contractor and its tech industry backers, all while such technologies as Brain Uploading, self-driving cars, cybernetic augmentation, Artificial Intelligence, and labor automation (currently being discussed by scientists, engineers, and futurists but not in actual widespread use as of the game's release) are rising to prominence.
  • Whispers of a Machine is a Sci-Fi Nordic Noir that tells the story of Vera, a cybernetically augmented detective in a post-AI world, who investigates a string of murders and unravels a dark conflict over forbidden technology.

    Web Comics 
  • NYC 2123 is definitely cyberpunk, black and white and red all over. In 2054 a massive tsunami devastates Manhattan. The island’s bridges and tunnels are destroyed. Two years of riots follow. Outlaw barge cities form in the waters around Manhattan, trafficking in body modifications and open source drugs. In 2065 the construction of a 20-meter-high barrier encircling what is left of Manhattan is completed and martial law is declared.
  • Aqua Regia: About Daniel and his work as a mercenary, it features a decadent Argentina and South America in 2054, full of crime and being controlled by the military instead of a MegaCorp, but still fits because they're using their military prowess to move their economy.
  • Blood is Mine is set in a world with robots, cybernetic enhancements, lab-grown genetically modified people, and bioprinters that can create limbs and organs. It also has megacorporations that control everything, including media and law enforcement, the protagonist's home city is segregated into different tiers where poor people from low tiers live in horrible conditions, and mutants and "lab meat" are heavily discriminated against.
  • Buying Time (NSFW) is set in a retro-cyberpunk universe where a MegaCorp has monopolized all social interaction, charging micropayments for any interpersonal contact longer or more intimate than a brief greeting.
  • Drugs and Wires is actually set in an alternate version of 1995 where people sport advanced cyberware but still use floppy disks. The comic both uses and satirizes various well-worn cyberpunk tropes and isn't above poking fun at its similarities to Neuromancer.
  • The Concrete World (NSFW) contains many cyberpunk staples, including VR as the next frontier for drug addiction.
  • The Lightstream Chronicles is a self-described "cyberpunk crime thriller" set in a near-future One World Order.
  • Metompsychosis Union depicts a world with highly advanced technology, where the one percent and mega-corperations all but own everyone else, and do engage in outright slave trade secretly.
  • The Sunjackers: A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic AU featuring a futuristic city controlled by megacorporations, and the band of hackers that oppose it.

    Web Original 
  • Avalon's Reign is a Web Serial Novel set in a world where corporations control almost everything and cybernetic augmentation is becoming common.
  • Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar Redux Cybernetically enhanced mathematicians in cooperation with megacorps trying to repair an algorithm which is able to save humankind.
  • Fenspace: The space station Genaros (an elongated Bernal sphere) was built with this aesthetic firmly in mind. It’s always dusk-dim inside it — the station’s windows were deliberately tinted to let in little light — and the interior is completely covered with neon, concrete (imported from Earth) and steel, with not a trace of green outside the station’s hydroponic food facilities. On top of everything else, there's sprinklers that simulate rain and holographic displays to make the sky look "like a television tuned to a dead channel". There’s no practical reason it had to be this way, mind — it's built the way it is because that's how the station's 22,000 residents like it.
  • Pokémon Legends Neo: Ghetsis: Much of the action is centered around Neo-Kanto City, a sprawling region-sized metropolis populated by the descendants of refugees from a cataclysm that devastated the rest of the world. The Guardes of the city sport high-tech uniforms and keep order by patrolling the wastes outside Neo-Kanto's dome and responding to Pokémon-based incidents within.

    Western Animation 
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