Release and Inspirations!

Howdy folks, and welcome to the third and final (for now!) installment in this series: 199X: COMPLEX! While the other two games were born from my affection for old tabletop games, COMPLEX is, as the name implies, heavily inspired by a famous anime - Ghost in the Shell, both the original OVA film and the Stand Alone Complex television series. 

I'll fully confess that I haven't touched the second (allegedly worse?) season of the show, but the film and the first season paint a beautiful picture of a sleek, post-cyberpunk world... that barely hides the decay underneath. Even as Section 9 fights to protect public safety and the greater good, it's readily apparent that they're beholden to the powers that be, complicit in terrible crimes, and "in bed" with some truly terrible interests. While the rest of 199X casts you as straightforward cyberpunks (survivors of corporate disasters in both SHUTDOWN and INFEST), COMPLEX begins with the agents near the top of the social hierarchy - which just means they have further to fall when things break bad.

I've always been obsessed with the cyberpunk genre's roots in noir, and it's impossible to talk about both without considering Blade Runner. Deckard hunts the synthetic-slaves of a distant future (2019!!) even as he falls into a deeply abusive romance with one, and considers if he might be such a "replicant" himself. Ryan Gosling's beautiful, impassive face adorns a replicant in the sequel, Blade Runner 2049, where the "replicant" is a loyal weapon of the state against his own kind even as his resolve begins to crumble. Both make abundantly clear that the state, the police, and the corporations (who are inseparable!) view both replicants and "real" humans as property, and that no violence is beyond reproach to maintain their hold over their herd. 

To be completely transparent: fuck cops. 199X: COMPLEX gives you all the tools for a game about the shiny police of a retro-future, but the works that inspire it make transparently clear that being any part of such a vicious machine compromises you, and that you are expendable to your masters - no matter your loyalty. It's in the hacker-cyberpunk spirit to take these toys and run loose with them; betray your bosses, try to get rich (or, y'know, save the world), or just steal everything here for your own stories far from the agency's shadow.

I hope you enjoy 199X: COMPLEX and its sister games; they're labors of love, and the realization of long-held tabletop dreams of mine! If you get any of them to the table, I'd absolutely love to hear about it.