The Cyberpunk Aesthetic: Where the Neon, Rain and Chrome Came From

The ingredients#

Strip the look to its parts and it comes down to a short list. Miss two and it reads as generic sci-fi.

• Artificial light: Color comes from signs, screens and adverts, not the sun. Pink, cyan and blue against black is the common palette.
• Rain and wet surfaces: Puddles double every light source. Rain is also a shorthand for a city that nobody maintains.
• Density: Stacked streets, towers and walkways, with cables and stalls on every surface. Blade Runner is built this way, with a Tyrell Building looming over the city in the way the Stadtkrone Tower looms over Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
• Mixed-language signage: English next to Japanese or Chinese suggests a world where no single country owns the future.
• Worn technology: Machines look used and patched, not sleek. The tech has reached ordinary people, and ordinary people repair it with tape.
• Visible bodies: Implants, prosthetic limbs and cables on show. In the tabletop game and Cyberpunk 2077, chrome is a status and a risk.

Blade Runner: the main source#

Almost every rainy neon street traces back to one film. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles in 2019. He has named Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks and the French comics magazine Metal Hurlant (where Jean 'Moebius' Giraud published) as mood sources, and described the cityscape as 'Hong Kong on a very bad day'.

Syd Mead conceived and designed the spinner, the film's flying police car. Vangelis composed the synthesiser score; it was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe in 1982, though the official soundtrack album took more than a decade to appear. The film underperformed in North America and found its audience later.

Gibson, Japan and the street#

William Gibson says Metal Hurlant was a visual influence on Neuromancer too. He also thought Japan was the genre's natural setting: 'Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk.' Case, the hero of Neuromancer, starts out as a hustler in Chiba City, Japan.

In animation, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira (manga 1982, film 1988) brought a Japanese version of the look, and director Mamoru Oshii has said the streets of the 1995 Ghost in the Shell film were based on Hong Kong. Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, demolished in 1994, is often cited as a model of the cyberpunk slum. The cyberpunk anime page covers what followed.

Cyberpunk, synthwave and retrofuturism#

Synthwave is an electronic music microgenre that draws on the film, game and cartoon soundtracks of the 1970s and 80s, including Vangelis's Blade Runner score. It borrows the look of that decade and is nostalgic about it.

Opinion: the difference is attitude. Synthwave likes the 1980s. Cyberpunk is about who pays for them. Retrofuturism, which looks at the future from an earlier era's point of view, covers both, and cyberpunk is by now partly retrofuturist itself.

How Cyberpunk 2077 uses it#

CD Projekt Red builds Night City from districts with their own styles, and the official E3 2018 trailer on this page is the studio's own presentation of that look. For the lore behind it, the Cyberpunk RED and Cyberpunk 2020 pages cover the tabletop source.

The tabletop games describe the style in words and leave the picture to the players. Mike Pondsmith designed the game with Blade Runner as a key influence, so the connection is direct.

Fixer's notes: if you want to make something in this style#

Start from a dark base and pick two accent colors, one warm and one cold. Light the scene from signs, not from the sun. Wear something out. Put a person in it. Our read: the best cyberpunk images have a noodle stall or a laundry line in them, with more than a skyline in frame.

For dialogue, see the cyberpunk slang page. For moving images, the cyberpunk movies page. Our read: the look is easy to copy and hard to mean, and the best use of it is to say something about money.

For the augmented-conspiracy branch of the look, see Deus Ex lore.