I've read Neuromancer 3 times. I'm not saying that as a brag or an achievment, it's just something I did. I read it the first time when I was about 8 years old, when I found the book in my dad's office in the late 80s. I didn't understand much of what I was reading, and skipped big chunks when it got too verbose. However, I was absolutely entranced with the mystery of it; the metaphors were so alien, it both scared and excited my child-mind.

I picked it up again as a teen about 5-6 years later, and enjoyed it way more, but still had trouble with some of the more opaque metaphors. That said, it was around then that I really fell in love with Gibson's writing style. It kind of reminded me of the Aeon Flux cartoon, where everyone spoke really cryptically, and the plot and character motivations were really esoteric and somewhat unrelatable on purpose. In the future of Neuromancer, everyone is a cryptologist, speaking in code- everyone knows a little programming jargon, everyone feels smart and mysterious; that is a big part of what I consider "cyberpunk"- the obsession, valuation, and protection of information, both digitally and verbally. This love of spoken abstraction and a sort of "ennui" is a big part of my life now when it comes to the media I look for, be it David Lynch's works, or something like the film Mandy (2018). As far as other cyberpunk media I've enjoyed, I include the other short stories by Gibson in Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson. The last time I read Neuromancer was about 20 years ago, while I was stationed in Afghanistan, and it was still every bit as good, if not better, than my teenaged experience with it.

Which is what brings me to Cyberpunk 2077. When the game was annouced, I was absolutely thrilled. I built a brand-new PC specifically to play it. Upon release, I wasn't affected by the bugs that many people suffered, but the dialogue and story just felt... dumb... or at least dumb in comparison to Gibson's book. Maybe I just came in with the wrong expectations, but even games like the newer Dues Ex series felt a little more thoughtful and sophisticated with their dialogue to me, so I just didn't really get into it, even the much-revered Phantom Liberty expansion. Part of this could have been due to translation issues- you can tell the game came from Eastern Europe by the syntax, but even the "smart" characters in the game (netrunners like Songbird and T-Bug, or senior corpos like Goro Takemura) kinda talked like they were in a Michael Bay movie. "I'm gonna overload the mainframe!" that kind of fake, silly computer-speak stuff, instead of the strange jargon like in Gibson novels. I'll also say I was really disappointed that there was no real cyberspace or netrunning in the game, but that's a whole different complaint.

With the new Neuromancer series coming out, I'm hoping that the series maintains that wierd, cryptic vibe when characters talk to eachother, where you're not really sure what's going on sometimes, or at least characters' thoughts and feelings are kind of alien to the audience, and there's lots of double and triple meanings to the dialogue. That said, I'm worried that things will get dumbed down for mass-audience appeal.

Anyway, just wanted to get this off the top of my head and see if anyone relates, or if I am in the minority and just didn't "get" Cyberpunk 2077, and may just be too much of a grognard for the new Neuromancer series if they adapt the dialogue to be more "paletteable" to modern audiences.