Now at Chaos Jelly, we like to think we are sorta woke. At least we’re more woke than some Elder Gods who lie dreaming below the lost city of R’lyeh. Or so we hope. Anyway, in honor of MLK day and leading up to Black History Month, we want to take the opportunity to talk about a black pioneer of role playing games, AD&D, cyberpunk, science fiction and fantasy: Mike Pondsmith.
Mike Pondsmith has been designing RPGs, video games and related products for almost 40 years, starting in the early days on Ultima and being a huge contributor to Traveller (one of the very first science fiction tabletop RPGs) as well as AD&D Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures. Now as an aside, Oriental Adventures is considered problematic these days for their tone-deaf generalizations and stereotypical Asian tropes. But you gotta understand, this was during the 80s, a decade of many horrible things like this and this and also this. Oriental Adventures was one of the first RPG properties within Advanced Dungeons & Dragons that really even gave the Far East its due. Sure, it contained a wide and deep variety of embarrassing chop-socky tropes of ninja, samurai, kaiju/godzilla and general kung fu fightin’. But it also uniquely focused on the mythology of Japan, China, Korea, Tibet, Mongolia, Indochina, Thailand, Indonesia and hell, even Siberia! I mean what other RPG of the time had monsters like the Kappa or Baku or Tengu or the Doc C’u’oc? Maybe only the Rokugan setting which was based on medieval Japan.
Cyberpunk 2020 and Cyberpunk 2077
Anyway, we digress. What Pondsmith is best known for in recent times in the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG and Cyberpunk 2077, the video game. Based on Pondsmith’s own creation from 1988, Cyberpunk The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future, which was set in 2013, the video game Cyberpunk 2077 is an update to that setting. The fictional Night City (based on an amalgamation of San Francisco and Los Angeles), has everything cyberpunk: megacities, mega-corporations vying for control, bio-engineering, economic collapse, a dystopian and gritty atmosphere, etc… you get it. Since Pondsmith hails from Oakland, he was able to add a lot of regional flair to the game, making it a favorite not only in the West Coast but all across the internet.
So here’s to Mike Pondsmith and hopefully he keeps adding to his massive canon of speculative fiction. The following video is a great interview with some awesome memories about his career. Hope ya’ll enjoy it.