Neo Tokyo Drift – Akira turns 30

Author: David Ager

What’s that, mate? You love future bikes? I do too. And what was that? You like laser guns and people that swell to a thousand times their normal size like they’ve been filled with Sunny D? I like that too. It may have been that strange combination of interests that means I ended up loving Akira, or maybe it’s the fact that if you have even a passing interest in science fiction then it’s almost impossible not to like Akira (even if you don’t understand it.)

It’s Cyberpunk week on Corehammer and when Nate threw the question out to everyone to see if they’d like to talk about something Cyberpunk that was close to their hearts, I knew that top of that list for me was Akira. I first saw Akira at a friends house when I was about 13, at the time we were obsessed with Metal Gear Solid, his Desert Eagle BB gun & these large figurines you could buy of SWAT and SAS figurines from a weird shop in Hull. Looking back at it now we were probably going the direction that several school shooters took but luckily my friend showed me a frog he’d killed and we didn’t speak after that.

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An ode to the Rue Jules Verne

Distorted Japanese neon signs, reflected in the pooling rain on a Shinjuku sidewalk. High tech low lives, mirror shades, cyberspace decks, smart drugs, riding on light, neural data jacks, androids, replicants & and the infinite possibilities of technology. This was the future I signed up for and it was glorious.

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Fear Tomorrow….Corehammer does Cyberpunk

Once again it’s time for a week of themed posts over here at the mighty Corehammer. Our Seven Nights Of Samhain theme was pretty successful last Halloween and it was a great opportunity to throw the doors wide open and invite some friends and allies to get involved. We are doing it all again this week and the theme is something thats been on my mind a lot these past few weeks, CYBERPUNK!!! With shows like Altered Carbon and Phillip K Dick’s Electric Dreams popping up in recent months alongside the new Bladerunner movie and Akira turning 30, I figured it’d be an appropriate time to don our disheveled trench coats and step outinto the hard rain of Neo Tokyo to take a look at yesterdays vision of tomorrow.

Any nerds who grew up in the 80’s will be familiar with the Cyberpunk juxtaposition of High Tech/Low Life. With it’s strong aesthetics, punk sensibilities, class politics and speculations on technology Cyberpunk caught hold of a lot of imaginations and inspired an enormous amount of radical art, literature, gaming and cinema. If you’re reading this blog it’s a reasonable assumption that you’re already familiar with genre benchmarks like William Gibson, Phillip K Dick, Akira, Bladerunner and so on…but what else?

Over the course of this week we’ll be taking a break from our regular content to probe the matrix by looking at some of the movies, music, games and ideas that contributed to Cyberpunk as a subgenre and it’s legacy in 2018.There’s also a new episode of Dungeonpunx in which the guys try to get their heads around cyberpunk by watching Johnny Mnemonic …..

Massive shout out to everyone who reached out and got involved. Check out Andrew Scully’s awesome SCUM poster at the top of the page and be sure to follow his work on Instagram @scullcomixinternational  I really appreciate all your efforts. We’ve got some great stuff for you this week..