SJ Games, GURPS Cyberpunk and the Secret Service Raid

[Daigoro]

The perennial mention of the Secret Service raid on SJG has come up again, this time in a lengthy reddit post, as a historical note on the Austin subreddit. Interesting read if you haven't heard about this before, and the GURPS Cyberpunk author pops in to give a few comments too.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comm...steve_jackson/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comm...eb2x&context=3

[Black Leviathan]

This seems insanely stupid now but in the era of Satanic Panic this was pretty ordinary Open Season behavior on RPG publishers.

[Hide]

Interesting reads indeed. I am glad the company is still here!

[Daigoro]

This might be the reason why SJG is leery of doing a new edition of Cyberpunk.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

This might be the reason why SJG is leery of doing a new edition of Cyberpunk.

I suspect it's more because there's not really enough there for a full-length subgenre book of its own. That one issue of Pyramid covers it pretty well.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

I suspect it's more because there's not really enough there for a full-length subgenre book of its own.

Just so. Cyberpunk faded away as a sub-genre of SF fairly rapidly, once writers found that there were a limited number of story structures that would work. People becoming much more familiar with computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s didn't help much either: nobody wants brain implants that crash regularly, and become obsolete in three years.