The Cyberpunk series timeline has gone through quite a journey, like a rollercoaster ride! Back in 1988, they rolled out the first Cyberpunk game, Cyberpunk 2013, taking us into a dark future. Then came three more books to add meat to the story and characters.
Fast forward to 1990, and they dropped Cyberpunk 2020, moving the timeline seven years ahead to, you guessed it, 2020. Night City came to life, and all those big corporations got juicy backstories.
In 1993, they shook things up again with CyberGeneration, leaping forward another seven years and tossing in supernatural abilities for extra excitement. CyberGeneration even spun off into an alternate reality.
Next, in 1997, we got the Firestorm books, designed to introduce the Fourth Corporate War concept and take us into the late 2020s-30s. Players faced off with Arasaka, with familiar faces like Morgan Blackhand and Johnny Silverhand in their corner. A third Firestorm book was planned but got folded into the Cyberpunk V3.0 rule book.
Zoom ahead to 2005, and we met Cyberpunk Version 3.0. Now it's the 2030s, and the aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War, Arasaka's Night City nuke, and Net data corruption were all on the table. Some folks weren't too thrilled with these changes, though.
Then, in 2013, CD Projekt RED grabbed the license and gave us Cyberpunk 2077, sending us way, way into the future. In 2018, they spilled the beans, revealing V, a lowly cyberpunk in Night City, as our new protagonist.
But wait, there's more! Mike Pondsmith announced Cyberpunk RED, set before 2077, which caused some timeline shuffling. The official timeline is a bit up in the air, and parts of the Firestorm and Cyberpunk v3.0 books have been tucked away for now.
With the Cyberpunk RED Jumpstart kit, we got some canon goodness: the Fourth Corporate War kicked off in 2021 and went official in 2022, the Net crashed in 2022 thanks to the DataKrash virus, and the Arasaka mini-nuke event, known as the "Night City Holocaust," shook things up in 2023.
It's pretty wild how Cyberpunk's vision of the future, crafted long ago, didn't quite match our reality, isn't it? Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, well, that's up for debate!
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