Neuromancer

About Neuromancer

Neuromancer (1988) is Interplay's cyberpunk adventure loosely based on William Gibson's novel, moving between Chiba City and a 3D cyberspace of ICE and rogue AIs, set to music by Devo.

Neuromancer in Depth

In 2058 in Chiba, Japan, the hero is trying to discover why his friends and other cyberspace cowboys are disappearing. Having fallen on hard times and pawned his cyberspace deck, he wakes face-down in a plate of Ratz's famous spaghetti, and his first task is to get the deck back from the pawnshop. Once upgraded for cyberspace, he finds Matrix users being flatlined by AIs led by the renegade Greystoke. After he destroys Greystoke, Neuromancer reveals that it manipulated him into killing the other AIs and traps him on a virtual island, from which he can escape to destroy Neuromancer and make the Matrix safe. Characters from the novel such as Armitage and Molly appear, sometimes as red herrings.

Play is split between a traditional adventure in Chiba City's "real world", where different locations open different grid sectors, and a 3D grid of cyberspace. There the player breaks through ICE to reach database nodes, trading damage with programs that hit once, over time or slow the ICE, until it cracks or the player is kicked out. AIs are fought mainly with skills, are invulnerable until hit with a specific skill or program, and losing to one means death, though a dead character can be revived for whatever money is on his credit chip. Skill chips bought for the brain jack implant give an edge, and skills improve with difficult successes. A code wheel is needed for PAX terminals.

Making Neuromancer

Interplay put most of its staff on the project to launch alongside the planned film; when the film was cancelled, Interplay considered dropping the game too but continued to avoid financial penalties. Mediagenic, a brand of Activision, published it in 1988 for the Amiga, Apple II, Apple IIGS, Commodore 64 and MS-DOS. Computer Gaming World's Douglas Seacat praised its pacing, wit, use of Gibson's setting and combat, complaining only about fixed conversation responses and disk swapping. Compute! praised its graphics, interface and Devo soundtrack, criticising only its "adolescent jokes", and named it one of nine great games for 1989.