—Barrington Williams, B1Daily

Mike Pondsmith doesn’t just get credit for inventing Cyberpunk as a game, he helped carve out space for Black futurism inside a genre that has often erased the people most affected by the futures it imagines.

Long before neon skylines and chrome limbs became mainstream aesthetics, Pondsmith was a young Black creator in the late 1980s looking at a world shaped by corporate power, surveillance, and technological inequality and asking who those futures were really for. When he created Cyberpunk in 1988, he wasn’t just designing a tabletop role-playing system. He was building a speculative framework that centered power, class, race, and resistance in a way science fiction rarely allowed Black voices to do at the time.

At its core, Cyberpunk rejected the clean, utopian visions that dominated traditional sci-fi. Pondsmith’s future was messy, unequal, and brutally honest — a world where technology amplified the same systems of exploitation that already existed. That perspective resonated deeply with lived Black experience. For many Black readers, gamers, and creators, Cyberpunk felt less like fantasy and more like extrapolation — a warning wrapped in style and attitude.

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Pondsmith’s work matters because representation in science fiction isn’t just about who appears on the page or screen, but who gets to define the future itself. For decades, Black creators were pushed to the margins of speculative fiction, even as Black communities were disproportionately impacted by the very technologies and systems sci-fi loves to imagine. Pondsmith quietly broke that barrier by existing — and succeeding — as a Black architect of a major sci-fi genre.

The influence of Cyberpunk stretches far beyond tabletop gaming. Its DNA runs through music, fashion, film, anime, and video games, shaping everything from hip-hop aesthetics to Afrofuturist storytelling. While the mainstream often strips cyberpunk of its political edge, Black creators have consistently reclaimed it as a language for survival, resistance, and self-definition in high-tech worlds that were never built with them in mind.

For Black science fiction creators today, Mike Pondsmith represents possibility. He proves that Black imagination belongs at the center of futurist storytelling, not as an afterthought or a niche. His success challenges the idea that Black speculative fiction must fit neatly into pre-approved categories, showing instead that Black creators can invent entire genres — and redefine them on their own terms.

In a moment where conversations about AI, surveillance, digital labor, and corporate control dominate global discourse, Pondsmith’s vision feels more relevant than ever. Cyberpunk was never just about aesthetics or rebellion for rebellion’s sake. It was about power, who wields it, and who pays the price when technology accelerates inequality.

Mike Pondsmith’s legacy is not just a game, a genre, or a franchise. It’s a door he kicked open. For Black science fiction creators, cyberpunk is proof that the future has always been ours to imagine — and to warn the world about — long before anyone else was ready to listen.

—Barrington Williams, B1Daily