He started writing a sequel, set a few years later, that focussed less on peacocking in snazzy getups than on the interlocking segments that make up a society. It was touching and hilarious at the same time.” Pondsmith kept thinking about the game’s world, and reading the novels that were beginning to form the Cyberpunk canon. Williams recalled a campaign in which he enlisted the writer Pati Nagle to play as a double agent another player seemed to fall for Nagle’s character and was, Williams told me, “utterly heartbroken that she’d betrayed him. But the format allowed for all kinds of inventiveness. The game, Pondsmith told me, was mostly about having cool gear and strutting around in it. It consisted of three books of rules and story lines and a pair of dice, and was set in the far-off year of 2013. Williams tested out the game as Pondsmith worked on it. in the thrall of technology and beset by rampant inequality. Pondsmith and Williams became friends, and Pondsmith began formulating a game set in Night City that drew, in part, on Williams’s ideas. In 1986, the writer Bruce Sterling published “ Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology” in the preface, Sterling contends that, for the then-new generation of sci-fi writers, technology is “visceral,” “utterly intimate.” That same year, Walter Jon Williams published the novel “ Hardwired,” set in a Balkanized post-United States, where the middle class has been decimated and megacorporations have unchecked power. It’s considered the quintessential cyberpunk novel, a genre that was just then entering its heyday. “Neuromancer” is the story of a data thief who uses a body-machine interface to break through a corporation’s A.I. That is also, as it happens, the name of the demimonde in William Gibson’s novel “ Neuromancer,” which had been published in 1984, though Pondsmith had not yet read it. Night City, Pondsmith thought this place should be called.
The sight evoked the neon Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” a movie he’d seen not long before. One rainy night around this time, Pondsmith was driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge when he looked out his window and saw what looked like a “mythical city,” he told me. R. Talsorian Games-named for the father of one Pondsmith’s friends, who’d invested in the company as a tax writeoff-incorporated in 1985.
By the second day, a few dozen people had gathered around his table, eager to have a go. His wife, Lisa, encouraged him to demo it at DunDraCon, a role-playing convention near San Francisco. He created another game, Mekton, which was inspired by his discovery of anime and involved giant fighting robots. He produced a good-looking rule book-although the game, in his view, was a hobbyist’s effort, developed as a pastime for his friends, some of whom have been playing a campaign in the Imperial Star universe for more than three decades. By 1982, he had a degree in graphic design, and he was soon working as a typesetter in a print shop at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He tinkered with the rules and ended up writing his own game, Imperial Star, which he finished around 1980. Plus, once the game began, the rules made it nearly impossible for the player’s character to die. There were aspects of the game that irked him. “You had this vast, sweeping empire with aliens in it and all this stuff,” he recalled, “and people had these spaceships, and they went all over the place and traded and fought.” He bought a copy of Traveller at a Bay Area hardware store shortly after it was released. “If I could’ve had a cape, I would have had a cape,” he told me, over video chat from his home in western Washington.
Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking “Star Wars” rogue played by Billy Dee Williams. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that “Star Wars” came out. “The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen,” an early D&D review noted. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world.
Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis.