Cover of GURPS Cyberpunk
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Designer(s) | Loyd Blankenship |
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Publisher(s) | Steve Jackson Games |
Publication date | 1990 |
Genre(s) | Cyberpunk |
System(s) | GURPS 3 |
GURPS Cyberpunk is a genre toolkit for cyberpunk-themed role-playing games set in a near-future dystopia, such as that envisioned by William Gibson in his influential novel Neuromancer. It was published in 1990 after a significant delay caused by the original draft being a primary piece of evidence in Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.
In 1993, GURPS Cyberpunk Adventures — a collection of three RPG scenarios in the GURPS Cyberpunk line — won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Adventure of 1992.
Besides the main chapters detailed below, GURPS Cyberpunk contains a glossary of common cyberpunk terms, an index, and a bibliography of relevant media.
Loyd Blankenship, who was hired by Steve Jackson Games in 1989, was close to finishing GURPS Cyberpunk later that year, which was intended both to get SJG into the cyberpunk genre which had been popular in the RPG industry for the last two years, and to help SJG get over a financial hurdle and back into the black.
GURPS Cyberpunk received notoriety when the Austin headquarters of Steve Jackson Games was raided by the U.S. Secret Service in 1990. The authorities seized the manuscript for the sourcebook, which was under development at the time, asserting that it was a "handbook for computer crime". The book was reconstructed and rewritten from older drafts when the manuscript was not returned. The seizure delayed publication for six weeks. This raid is often wrongly attributed to Operation Sundevil, a nationwide crackdown on illegal computer hacking activities that was occurring about this time.
GURPS Cyberpunk was ultimately published in 1990, joining the already-released Cyberpunk 2013 (1988) from R. Talsorian, Cyberspace (1989) from ICE, and Shadowrun (1989) from FASA.