Dueling Games: With Shadowrun, primarilynote A number of other cyberpunk-themed tabletop games existed at the height of the rivalry, but almost none remain in print., the main difference between the two being Shadowrun's inclusion of fantasy elements (dragons, elves, magic, etc.). Purists stuck with the former, but the latter was more consistently popular thanks to cross-genre audience appeal. The release of Cyberpunk's much maligned 3rd Edition, combined with financial troubles at R. Talsorian, caused the game to disappear from shelves for several years, allowing Shadowrun to dominate the market, but with the Cyberpunk 2077 video game adaptation and Cyberpunk Red as the next edition, Cyberpunk appears poised to make a comeback.
The first edition, Cyberpunk 2013, went out of print in favor of its more popular second edition. Used copies can be found online for upwards of $500.
Averted for Cyberpunk 2020 and its spinoffs and sequels. After Cyberpunk 2077 was announced, scalpers attempted to scam people interested in the original game by selling used copies at a jacked up price, even though the Cyberpunk franchise is still being sold by R. Talsorian Games.
Science Marches On: Even if most of the data present there has withstood the past of time well, some information about the Solar System in the Deep Space supplement is now outdated.
Sequel Gap: It took 15 years after Cyberpunk 2020 to receive a sequel in form of Cyberpunk V3.0, and then another 14 years to receive a Cyberpunk RED update. Discounting V3.0 as a Canon Discontinuity, the gap sums up to 29 years from 2020 to RED.
There's nothing, at least in the Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook, like a smartphone — mobile phones are of the dumb variety and more expensive than Real Life ones too, and the closest thing to one -portable computers to have Internet access everywhere- are quite pricey. Cyberpunk RED fixed it with the Agent, which can be seen as an advanced version of a smartphone.
Unfortunately in space exploration, the Cyberpunk world has decades of advantage on Real Life one, with several space stations, moonbases, and even Mars colonies.
The internet is now divided and non-global with the majority of the world having independent unconnected servers.
Global warming is a notable part of the Cyberpunk world's backstory, but it is rooted in the Earth's ozone layer thinning to the point where excess solar radiation is allowed to wreak havoc on the world's ecosystem. This was a major concern during the 1980's, but the 1987 Montreal Protocols and subsequent legislation phased out most of the major causes of ozone layer depletion, and it has in fact been recovering ever since, with the environmental concern turning to the effects of greenhouse gases in their place.
, the unreleased third title in the Firestorm sourcebook series, Firestorm: Aftershock, was reworked into a mainline title named Cyberpunk RED after almost two decades.