Some of my earliest character drawings were made for people sitting near me. Around 2001 and 2002, while I was at Alfred Deakin High School in Canberra, I took part in a handful of pen-and-paper role-playing games, including Cyberpunk. I drew my friends' characters, giving a visible form to the people we were imagining together. The drawings were an aid to our adventures, a way of making something shared easier to see. Looking back, I recognise an early version of a creative impulse that has remained with me: somebody describes a person or a place, and I want to find out what happens when it acquires a face, a posture, a particular way of occupying space. Mike Pondsmith's world was among the places where I first practised that movement between another person's imagination and my own.
My participation was brief. I have never considered myself a dedicated tabletop player, and Dungeons & Dragons has never been a central part of my life. I respect the concentration, generosity and improvisational skill that people bring to those games, while knowing that the discipline itself is not where I feel most at home. Drawing was my way into the encounter. That distinction helps me understand the durability of Pondsmith's influence. Something reached me through a form I would only occasionally inhabit, then continued into forms that became much more familiar. The friendships around the table, the invented characters and the possibility of contributing an image all belonged to the same experience. I could participate in a world by helping somebody else recognise the person they wanted to become within it.
This is the fourth entry in Pillars, following Matt Nava, Frank Frazetta and Hideo Kojima. Each has helped me imagine a different aspect of what storytelling can do. With Pondsmith, I keep returning to the life surrounding a character: the work they can find, the people they depend upon, the institutions that can hurt them, and the small freedoms they defend. His name belongs beside those other creative heroes because Cyberpunk became foundational to my own imaginative life. Its connection with The Fighter, one of the earliest stories in The Quantumyth, reaches back to those school years. Before discussing that connection, I want to recognise the world he created and the people at R. Talsorian Games who have continued to give it depth.
The chronology restores something that the scale of the later video game can obscure. The original Cyberpunk appeared in 1988; Cyberpunk 2020 followed in 1990. Long before Night City could be traversed as a continuous digital environment, it existed through books, illustrations, rules and the people imagining their way between them. Pondsmith created this particular fictional world within a cyberpunk tradition already developing across other media. His achievement included making its pressures available to participation. A reader could become someone with a history inside the setting, then discover what that history meant when another person made a decision. By the time it reached my friends and me, Cyberpunk already carried years of other people's encounters, while remaining open enough to accommodate ours.[1, 2]
Drawing a character makes certain questions difficult to avoid. Clothing has to sit on a body. An alteration needs a place to connect. A face has to register some relationship with the world around it. Even a relatively simple portrait can imply money, work, injury or aspiration through the choices it makes. I cannot reconstruct every decision in those early drawings, and I would not pretend that my younger self was consciously thinking through all of this. What I recognise now is the education contained in the activity. A character's appearance could suggest circumstances beyond the page. Imagining somebody's equipment gradually becomes an invitation to imagine their day. Who made it? Who can repair it? What does wearing it allow them to do, and what might it require of them?
Pondsmith's world rewards that kind of curiosity because its inhabitants occupy different positions within a working society. Technical knowledge, medicine, communication and personal connections can all become sources of influence. I am drawn to fiction that lets competence remain particular. A person who knows how to repair a mechanism understands something that another person may never notice. Someone who knows a neighbourhood can read a situation differently from someone carrying better equipment. These differences give an ensemble reasons to need one another. They also make a city larger than the protagonist's immediate purpose. While one person prepares for danger, somebody else is making a living, maintaining a relationship or trying to get home. The setting acquires credibility through the coexistence of those unfinished lives.
R. Talsorian's own retrospective emphasises the original game's integration of a character's history into its mechanics.[1] I like the consequence of that decision. A person arrives with attachments, and those attachments can become active when the story begins. For someone inclined to invent characters visually, it offers a useful challenge: a striking silhouette is the beginning of an inquiry. The person inside it has already experienced things. They may be carrying a judgement formed under circumstances that no longer apply. They may owe somebody a kindness, fear a familiar voice or misunderstand the effect they have on a friend. Worldbuilding becomes more persuasive when these connections can disturb the apparent completeness of the design. A character should have somewhere to go that the initial drawing has not settled for them.
The corporate city gives those private lives an enclosing structure. I find its most unsettling implications in the ordinary dependencies through which power can operate. A person needs treatment, somewhere to sleep, a reliable way to work. Technology enters those needs and can become inseparable from the conditions attached to meeting them. Imagining the future therefore involves asking who controls access. A magnificent invention can improve a life while leaving its user exposed to whoever maintains it. That possibility gives cyberpunk an intimacy I value as a storyteller. The scale of the institution becomes visible through an individual predicament. An enormous organisation can remain distant and still determine whether somebody gets through the next hour. The machinery matters because there is a person trying to live with it.
Pondsmith has described Cyberpunk as a warning, and the phrase deserves to stay attached to the attractive images his world makes possible. In his 2020 NME interview, he said, “Cyberpunk is a warning, not an aspiration.” He also spoke about characters fighting for friends, family and neighbourhoods.[3] I hear a humane scale of obligation in that account. A person can recognise that something is wrong and still begin with the lives nearest them. Their loyalty gives the larger argument somewhere to become concrete. For me, this is one reason the genre's beauty can remain emotionally complicated. I can admire an imagined street while recognising how difficult it would be to live there. The affection belongs to the people finding ways through it, and to the creative intelligence that makes their situation convincing.
One of the most affecting details in the development of Cyberpunk RED concerns actual people who use prosthetic limbs. R. Talsorian explained in 2020 that Pondsmith had been inspired by a photograph of a group at DragonCon and invited them to help create characters.[4] I appreciate the attention in that gesture. People whose bodies are routinely used as speculative imagery were invited into the making of the fiction. Their experience could contribute to what became visible. It also encourages a more generous understanding of technology in a dark future. An artificial limb can belong to someone's freedom, pleasure and self-expression. The ethical questions concern the treatment of the person, the conditions surrounding the technology and the choices available to them. Those questions become harder and more interesting when the person remains fully present.
There is also pleasure in remembering how far Pondsmith's imagination extends beyond Night City. Mekton, Teenagers from Outer Space and Castle Falkenstein belong to an unusually varied body of work. R. Talsorian's account of Castle Falkenstein describes a Victorian fantasy where magic and speculative science coexist, with cards serving a central role in play.[5] I admire that willingness to let a fictional world suggest the form of the encounter. Different kinds of stories need different expectations about what a person can do, what a decision costs and what counts as a satisfying surprise. The range gives me another reason to regard him as a storyteller. He has repeatedly helped establish conditions in which unfamiliar lives can become imaginable, then left room for people to discover what those conditions allow.
The invitation to contribute is part of what stayed with me from school. A shared world makes a peculiar demand of an artist: you have to listen closely enough for somebody else's idea to survive your interpretation. Drawing a friend's character involves a small negotiation between what they have imagined and what your hand can produce. Success includes their recognition. I can see how that modest activity anticipates larger collaborative work, where writers, performers and visual artists must arrive at something none could have completed alone. Pondsmith's influence travelled through that kind of exchange before I could have described it as an influence. His world supplied enough structure for us to begin, while our particular contributions made the experience belong to the people who were there.
The movement into Cyberpunk 2077 makes the relationship between a world and its interpreters especially visible. CD Projekt RED's adaptation required the work of a vast creative and technical team, building upon the setting and working with its creator.[3, 6] I want to recognise both the originating imagination and the authorship involved in bringing it into another medium. A painted street, a written description and a place the player can walk through have different obligations. The walkable place must continue when the player turns around. Its scale has to survive waiting, wandering and looking at an unremarkable corner. I find that act of interpretation fascinating because it exposes how much worldbuilding resides in the apparently incidental. The city becomes convincing partly through things the central story never needs to mention.
Cyberpunk RED gives that continuity a different form. Its principal setting is 2045, between the earlier tabletop era and 2077, and R. Talsorian describes its society as rebuilding after the Fourth Corporate War.[7] I am interested in the imaginative responsibility implied by returning to a damaged place. Destruction leaves practical questions behind. People need shelter, routes, materials and some reason to trust a promise. Rebuilding can reproduce old arrangements or create opportunities that the previous order withheld. A fictional world gains something when time changes its inhabitants' circumstances instead of merely supplying a new date. The street can carry competing memories. A building may be useful to someone who knows nothing about what it used to mean. History becomes something people have to live among.
The published contents of Night City 2045 make this attention to everyday systems unusually clear. Alongside factions and dangerous locations, the book makes room for public transport, housing, medical care, utilities, government and local media.[8] Those subjects interest me because they give a setting habits. A person living there has to negotiate distances and interruptions. Access to a service can alter a friendship or determine whether a plan is possible. I want to feel that a fictional place continues between its extraordinary events, with routines that somebody understands well enough to resent or appreciate. The life of the city then exceeds the adventure occurring within it. An invented environment becomes more generous when the imagination can settle somewhere that has a function beyond staging the next confrontation.
The Forlorn Hope gives that idea a particularly moving address. In his account of the location's history for Tales of the RED: Hope Reborn, J Gray describes a Night City bar established as a refuge for veterans, later serving as a shelter and improvised treatment centre after catastrophe.[12] A place created for gathering acquires further obligations as the world changes around it. I find that continuity more affecting than an immaculate monument to endurance. People adapt a room because someone needs to be brought inside. Familiar relationships become a resource when formal arrangements fail. The history gives the imagined building emotional depth through changes in use: drinking, sleeping, recovering, returning. I admire a fictional world that allows such a place to accumulate meaning, with care becoming part of its architecture through the actions of successive inhabitants.
There is a lesson here for the scale of invented histories. A large chronology becomes easier to feel when the same modest location appears at different points within it. The reader can register change against something already known. An earlier promise may have survived in altered circumstances, or somebody may be trying to recover a purpose that the building's current owners have forgotten. Those possibilities give history an emotional texture beyond the succession of major events. They also make room for the characters whose work consists of continuing: opening the door, maintaining the equipment, recognising who has been absent. I am increasingly drawn to that kind of persistence in my own storytelling. An adventure can alter the visible order of a world while depending upon forms of attention that have been keeping people alive for years.
That same attention brings me back to the actual people sustaining the work. Lisa Pondsmith has handled R. Talsorian's business side for much of its history and has contributed writing; Cody Pondsmith's work includes leading The Witcher tabletop project and serving as general manager.[9] Their presence belongs within this appreciation. A creative world needs people who can keep work moving, make decisions and carry responsibilities that remain largely invisible to its audience. I feel gratitude for that labour because its effects eventually reach the page in somebody else's hands. The book exists, the collaborator can contribute, the next encounter becomes possible. Family participation gives this history a particular character, while the work itself deserves recognition in its own terms, with names attached to the people who do it.
J Gray, Cyberpunk's line manager, and senior designer James Hutt help shape the continuing work. Winter Blue Jaye brings art direction and expertise that includes accessibility and user experience. Robert Barefoot serves as media ambassador, a role he took over from Gray in 2023.[9, 10] Seeing those responsibilities together helps explain why I want the team represented alongside Mike. A world reaches people through many forms of judgement, including the clarity of a page and the quality of a conversation. For a reader encountering the work at a particular age, those decisions may become inseparable from the work itself. I remember drawing characters at school. Somewhere behind that memory were people who had made it possible for a book and its images to reach us.
The connection with The Fighter belongs to that same period. Its earliest durable form dates to around 2001, making it one of the oldest stories in The Quantumyth. Another influence was Blood Lines, the PlayStation game whose roaming arena combat helped suggest a different way of imagining a fight.[11] The memories converge around a creative appetite: distinctive characters moving through a future that seemed capable of containing more life than the immediate contest revealed. Cyberpunk contributed to my sense of that future and to the pleasure of designing people who might inhabit it. Blood Lines contributed a particular spatial excitement. I can acknowledge both while recognising that a story changes as the person making it acquires other experiences. Its early energy remains available even as its questions become more demanding.
In its developed form, The Fighter follows Vonna Reid, a scrapyard mechanic on Arthos, where Kolfort Galactic has extended corporate authority into civic identity and bodily life. The story's Psychopunk frame grows out of her practical knowledge, while its underground cultures, the Lines, make belonging something people can join, dispute and change. Vonna's struggle brings technological modification into contact with the right to determine one's own life.[11] These are the elements through which I most clearly recognise the older Cyberpunk influence. They give me an opportunity to ask what a person can make under conditions designed to restrict them. Her knowledge has been acquired through work. It can help her understand an imposed system well enough to interfere with the authority it claims over her.
I want that practical intelligence to be visible in any eventual adaptation. The viewer should be able to look at a mechanism and sense that somebody has made decisions about it. A joint needs clearance. A component needs to be reached when it fails. A repaired surface can record effort without an explanatory speech. The appeal of a cybernetic body, for me, includes the relationship between its wearer and the work involved in keeping it usable. That relationship can contain pride, exhaustion or pleasure. It also gives the artist opportunities for tenderness. Someone making an adjustment for another person must pay attention to comfort and consent. A scene of repair can reveal a friendship through the patience with which two people solve a small problem together.
This is where I would want Pondsmith's sensibility close to the project. I would value his judgement about the circumstances surrounding an invention and the lives made possible by it. A convincing future has to accommodate people who disagree about what its technologies mean. Someone may love a modification that another person would refuse. Someone may depend upon an arrangement they resent. I want characters to possess enough particularity that the political argument has to reckon with them. The person who appears compromised from a distance may be making an unbearable choice for somebody they love. Recognising that complexity should sharpen the story's judgement about power, because it reveals how much pressure can be concealed inside a decision that initially appears straightforward.
The arena inheritance asks another set of questions. What does an ability mean when the space changes? How does confidence alter when a person has to pursue someone, retreat or rely upon another competitor? I am interested in action that lets character emerge through decisions about distance. A powerful body still needs to read a room. A fast one still needs somewhere useful to go. The remembered excitement of Blood Lines remains a useful source of energy for that thinking, while the story's wider world gives each encounter consequences beyond the contest.[11] I would want an adaptation to make the player curious about the people they face. Fighting can become one encounter within a relationship that neither participant completely understands at the beginning.
The quieter scenes would need equal conviction. A fictional future becomes more precious when somebody has an ordinary reason to want tomorrow to arrive. There can be work left to finish, a conversation postponed or a place someone hopes to make comfortable. I want that scale of desire to remain visible around the dramatic action. It gives freedom a use. A person who gains more control over their life should have something they might choose to do with it, including things that would never make an impressive trailer. Pondsmith's account of people defending their neighbourhoods keeps returning to me here. It encourages attention to the lives for whose sake the larger struggle is being undertaken, and to the obligations that continue once a confrontation ends.
An imagined future collaboration belongs within that hope. I would love to place The Fighter before Mike Pondsmith and the R. Talsorian team, to hear what they recognised, what they questioned and where they thought the world needed more life. That possibility remains an aspiration. Naming an influence gives me a responsibility to understand it more carefully and an opportunity to say where gratitude has accumulated. The fourth pillar acknowledges a relationship that began long before I could place it within a series of essays. It began with some friends, a handful of games and the wish to draw the characters we were talking about. The work has continued changing; the impulse to make an imagined person visible has remained remarkably constant.
Thank you, Mike, for making a future that found its way into those early drawings, and for the intelligence and humanity you have continued to bring to it. Thank you to Lisa, Cody, J, James, Winter and Robert, and to the many collaborators whose work makes these worlds available to others. I think of the distance between a book being made somewhere else and a teenager in Canberra trying to draw his friends' characters. An influence crosses that distance through ordinary acts of making and sharing. Years later, I can recognise something of it in a story of my own. The Fighter has grown through much of my life, carrying questions I could only gradually learn to ask. Pondsmith's world helped give that curiosity a place to begin.
Sources and further reading
1. R. Talsorian Games, A Celebration of Cyberpunk, 27 August 2018.
2. R. Talsorian Games, Mixing Drinks Changing Lives, Cyberpunk RED supplement, 2024.
3. Vikki Blake, interview with Mike Pondsmith, NME, 9 December 2020.
4. R. Talsorian Games, Cyberpunk Red Meet the New Edgerunners, 12 June 2020.
5. R. Talsorian Games, About R. Talsorian Games.
6. CD Projekt RED, REDstreams Special with Mike Pondsmith, 28 October 2025.
7. R. Talsorian Games, The Cyberpunk Red FAQ, updated 2021.
8. J Gray, Welcome to Night City 2045 Number 1 Contents, R. Talsorian Games, 12 February 2026.
9. R. Talsorian Games, The R. Talsorian Crew.
10. J Gray, New Media Ambassador, R. Talsorian Games, 2 October 2023.
11. Albert Chessa, The Fighter 2001, current published treatment.
