10 Video Games That Did Cyberpunk Better Than Cyberpunk 2077

4. Neuromancer

Do you like poetry? I do. One of the endings to Cyberpunk 2077 features netrunner-turned--AI Alt Cunningham reading T.S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. As you traipse through cyberspace, Alt reads this line:

“Let us go then, you and I, where the evening is stretched out against the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table”.

Good line. Had basically nothing to do with Cyberpunk 2077, but a good line.

I bring it up because it’s often said that T.S Eliot, with that one line, invented modernist poetry. Another line, which also references the sky, is similarly credited with creating an entire genre. That line is the opening line to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and goes like this:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

That man's name was Albert Einstein, and that genre was cyberpunk.

Neuromancer the game is a 1988 adventure game designed, in part, by Brian Fargo, of Wasteland and Fallout fame. Interestingly enough, the rights were originally owned by 60’s counterculture icon Timothy Leary. That game could have been quite special, but the Neuromancer we got is still considered to be quite good. It features the line “You just spent the night sleeping face-down in a plate of synth-spaghetti’, which is much better than anything in Cyberpunk 2077.