In 1988, cyberpunk was a literary phenomenon nobody knew how to play. William Gibson’s Neuromancer had painted a world of neon and nerve. The problem wasn’t rules—any competent system could simulate a firefight in a corporate arcology. The problem was inhabitation.

Mike Pondsmith’s answer was structural: Give them a past. Give them enemies. Give them a death wish. Then make every bullet count. That answer—encoded in the Lifepath system, enforced by Friday Night Firefight, and refined across four decades—would change how designers thought about character creation, genre simulation, and the relationship between a player and their fictional skin.

The Lifepath Revolution: Marc Miller’s Traveller (1977) invented lifepath character generation. Pondsmith asked: “Who is this character?” The Cyberpunk Lifepath doesn’t generate statistics—it generates narrative. Your brother was killed by a boostergang. Your ex-lover works for the corporation hunting you. You owe money to a fixer who will come collecting. The GM now has plot hooks attached to a character who hasn’t acted yet.

Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel (2002) built its entire character system on narrative lifepaths. Modiphius’s 2d20 line uses narrative lifepath generators that trace directly to the Cyberpunk model. Mark Smylie’s Artesia: Adventures in the Known World explicitly adapted “R. Talsorian Games’ LifePath character-generation system.” Eclipse Phase uses it. Legend of the Five Rings uses it. Pondsmith calls it “probably our biggest contribution to gaming design and development.” He’s right.

Style Over Substance: Every mechanical choice reinforces the genre. In Cyberpunk, combat is lethal because noir is lethal. A veteran character has no more biological durability than a street kid. Survival depends on not getting hit and armor quality. The Humanity mechanic makes this philosophy quantifiable. Every piece of cyberware costs Humanity points. Hit zero, and your character succumbs to cyberpsychosis—the central philosophical tension of transhumanism became a number on a character sheet.

The Interlock Engine: Stat + Skill + 1d10 ≥ Difficulty Value. In an era when many RPGs used different dice for different activities, Interlock applied one mechanic uniformly. Friday Night Firefight married this simplicity to genuine tactical consequence. Hit locations determined by d10. Separate armor values per location. Armor degradation from repeated hits. The “death spiral” was intentional—gunfights should be terrifying.

The Fuzion Stumble and RED Correction: Every career has a chapter to skip. Pondsmith’s is Fuzion—merging Interlock with HERO—which violated his own first principle: Setting dictates mechanics. Cyberpunk v3.0 (2005) was a critical and commercial failure. Cyberpunk RED (2020) is what happens when a seventy-year-old master fixes what a thirty-year-old innovator broke. Back to Interlock. Back to the d10. Back to the setting-specific philosophy.

But not back to old problems. Netrunning was rebuilt entirely. All ten Role Abilities were redesigned. The skill list was trimmed. R. Talsorian’s largest printing in over thirty years sold out in two weeks.

The Honest Assessment: Pondsmith’s strength is consistency. An 8 across the board—the signature of a complete designer. Invention: The narrative Lifepath system transformed character generation, adopted by dozens of later RPGs. The Humanity/cyberpsychosis mechanic was the first quantified philosophical-cost system in RPGs. Castle Falkenstein’s card-based resolution pioneered full-system playing-card mechanics in RPGs. Architecture holds at 8—locked by the methodology’s own scoring scales. The system has real depth: unified resolution, interconnected subsystems, decades of extended play supported by massive supplement lines. Mastery holds at 8. Four decades of published design from Mekton (1984) through Cyberpunk RED (2020).

Total: 33 points. Year: 1984.

That flatline is the rarest shape on the chart.