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There Needs To Be an Android Video Game

There Needs To Be an Android Video Game

Allow me a little bit of self-indulgence today. Recently, I have taken up the hobby of playing Fantasy Flight’s living card game, Android: Netrunner . For those of you who don’t know, Android is a cyberpunk universe set in a future where humanity isn’t all that special anymore. We easily are able to create bioroids who look and act exactly like us, right down to having feelings, hopes, and dreams. We are also easily able to clone human beings and create “perfect” human beings, allowing us to pick out designer children and even designer loved ones. We have built a space elevator to the moon, which has been colonized, and our technology has advanced so much that brain to computer interface is incredibly easy and commonplace. The only problem is that corporations rule the world, like in any good cyberpunk universe.

Android isn’t just a card game. It’s also a board game and a set of novels. The board game and novels give it a distinct feeling of cyberpunk noir. It’s difficult to track down murderers in a world where people can simply be created whenever you want. You follow alcoholic private eyes, down on their luck police officers, escaped clones, troubled bioroids, and people in debt to various criminal organizations as they try to get to the bottom of murder and general wrongdoing. It’s absolutely dripping with narrative excellence… and it’s a board game!

Granted, I may simply just be a fan of this universe, but I ask you: why haven’t we seen a video game in this universe before? Granted, we have seen plenty of cyberpunk video games. Heck, a lot of our modern day gaming conventions have come about because of cyberpunk games like Deus Ex and System Shock . But Android is just dripping with this interesting theme that makes it feel somehow very close to our current day existence. It almost feels as if we ourselves are on the brink of falling into a cyberpunk dystopia soon.

There Needs To Be an Android Video Game

There are a lot of different genres that a potential Android game could take advantage of. A shooter or stealth game could be an easy fit, considering games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution have done decently well. Heck, I’d be OK with a digital interface for the card game alone. But I’d be very interested to see the Android universe turned into a cinematic game, something along the lines of what Telltale did with The Wolf Among Us . It could be based around mystery and murder, and could do for sci-fi what TWAU does for fantasy.

What do you think? Are you a fan of the Android universe? Would you like to see it made into a video game? If so, what genre would you like to see?

If you don’t know anything about the series, click here to learn about the board game and novels, or here to learn about the card game.

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