The future has imploded into the present. With no nuclear war, the new battlefields are people's minds and souls. Mega-corporations are the new governments. Computer-generated info domains are the new frontiers. Though there is better living between science and chemistry, we are all becoming slavebots. The computer is the new, cool tool.
Though we say, "All information shall be free," it is not. Information is the power and currency of the virtual world we inhabit, so we mustn't trust authority. Cyberpunks are the true rebels. Cyber-culture is coming in under the radar. An unordinary society, an unholy alliance with the tech world, and a world of organized descent.
Welcome to the Cyber Corporation, Cyberpunks.
Let's go back to 1993 for a moment, when pop/rock star Billy Idol released an album called "Cyberpunk" that was universally panned by critics and fans alike. Let’s be clear; the album does suck a little. It's a significant departure from the pop/rock that made him famous, and I don't feel like he ever managed to fully nail down the sound he was going for. Still, it should get a little credit for being the first album to ship with additional digital multimedia content, right? It came on a floppy disk!
I'm not here to philosophize or wax poetic about the deeper meaning or importance of this album, but I've always loved the untitled "Intro" track. It's a little heavy-handed in its delivery, but it's the first major, mainstream musical effort that attempted to capture what Gibson, Stephenson, and Sterling were writing about. It was lame, aging Billy Idol, narrating someone else's writing about cyberpunk culture, but it was also awesome!
I've got a lot of big stuff coming up in the real world this month, so I was initially disappointed that May was also "Cyber Month" here on the VaM Hub. I knew this theme would be coming back in March when I was creating Magic Mushrooms for "Elf Month," so it was only a matter of when it would arrive, rather than if. I was worried I couldn’t dedicate enough time to the theme I was looking forward to the most. Fortunately, I remembered this little audio gem, and here we are with a showcase of some of my favorite creator's VaM content, wrapped into a short, cinematic clip with some semi-cheesy narration from the early 90s.
The pickin's are slim on this one, if you’re looking for a time killer. At 77 seconds of total runtime, it wasn't built for a first-person VR experience, so there’s no Embody on the male atom. The main thrust was to make this a cinematic cam ride, so that's the button to click here, but you can also view it without the cam ride.
I've added some atmospheric stuff too (some Macgruber PostMagic effects, some hazmhox rain, and a window reflection) and so performance might not be awesome on slower machines. There are toggles to turn this stuff off, if you need to. It’s also worth adding a STROBE WARNING for those sensitive to them. It’s not too bad in this scene, I don’t think, but I’m also not the one the warning is directed at!
I really enjoyed working on this short project, so I might be revisiting some cyber-stuff in a future scene. For right now, I just wanted to contribute to a theme I hold dear and get something out there before I'm out of time in May to do so.
Enjoy!
Directions
There are two Start buttons, one for the cam ride, and one without. The cam ride will pop you into Embody on the camera atom. Hitting Escape or opening the VaM menu will take you out of the ride. The Stop / Reset button does exactly what it says it does, Volume is for the voice-over and one sound effect later in the scene, and all the little checkboxes are to toggle the various visual effects, in case you need to adjust for performance or prefer a different look. Oh, and there's a faint Hide Menu toggle to get rid of that whole distracting menu.
Credits
The scene above showcases some resources that I haven’t ever used before, along with the old classics that I use all the time. The return heroes here are a slew of stuff from AcidBubbles (Embody, Glance, Spawn Point, and Timeline), hazmhox’s Fluids 101, MacGruber’s PostMagic, ToumeiHitsuji’s Divining Rod, and kemenate’s Male beards pack.
The main character here is mopedlampe’s incredible Motoko 2.0 look. Honestly, calling it a “look” seems to hardly do it justice because it’s just so much more badass than what most of the rest of us are doing in that department. I went with one of the hairstyles from Miki’s Cyberpunk Hairstyles pack and kept VL_13’s Lashes that Motoko already had. I used the Cyberpunk apartment and assets that are already built into VaM because I didn’t need much more for an environment here, but I did use the skybox included in incuboy’s Oculus Apartment to give the apartment some extra “height.” Lastly, I’d like to give a shoutout to @Juno for mentioning Chokaphi’s Decal Maker last month in a Discord conversation. I did a lot of unnecessary work in my Elf Month’s Magic Mushrooms scene when trying to transition between different textures on a single atom (the switching between Elf sisters.) I used it here for some late-scene texture loading and it was AWESOME.
This scene is straightforward with its dependencies, but if I’ve missed anyone at all that should be credited for their contributions, please reach out to me so I can correct it! Without the hard work of the people above, I wouldn’t be able to make these scenes. They deserve every bit of acknowledgement we can give them!
