While piecing together these various documents and artefacts, we found ourselves returning to one important question: how would the interactive role-playing element even work?

Having a weekly cyberpunk series which people at home can play along with sounds like the greatest concept in the entire world–the cultural equivalent of George Lemaître’s contribution to the Big Bang Theory. Who wouldn’t get involved?!

But sadly there’s a reason it hasn’t been done: our research suggests it is utterly unworkable.

Bear in mind that we can’t find a single reference to Cyberia’s gaming mechanics. As we have seen in the various Give Me Head office dynamics: most employees were completely clueless as to what was going on.

Our theory is that the project couldn’t get beyond the fundamentals and so nobody was actually thinking about how it was all going to work. If the brighter employees had slowed down and worked on this particular aspect of the project then they would have realised it was impossible and saved themselves a clusterfuck of a headache. But rather than scrapping the original concept and giving up, they could’ve still changed course and sold the collectors’ cards as merch.

But let’s say they did try to cling to the concept to the bitter end: given how primitive the technology was back in 1988. What were their options?

Taken to its logocal conclusion as a purely broadcasted television series, the only feasible way we can think of is that each episode is approximately a day long. This would allow time for each of the fifty characters to have some form of development each week. The scenes would have to be open-ended, allowing for various twists and turns depending on how the players proceed at home.

Worse still, players would surely have to record each and every day long episode so that they can play out the storyline. Doing it in real time would be full of spoilers and extremely difficult.

Once they had the full recording (which would require between 5 and 10 VHS cassettes depending on length and girth), they would spend several hours hitting the fast forward, rewind and stop button per gaming session; especially because they would need to avoid watching other characters’ narrative arcs.

None of this is viable. In fact there is no way a broadcasting channel would run such a mess. How this wasn’t brought up by any of the team is beyond us. However, given how things panned out, it’s also no great surprise.

Finally, we believe there’s another simple solution to make the gaming element work: along with the collectors’ cards, publish a book which covers everything the game needs and run an hour-long episode once a week that’s really just a gritty commercial for the Cyberia game.

Simple right?

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