The basic rules system of Cyberpunk 2020 (called the Interlock System) is skill-based rather than level-based, with players being awarded points to be spent on their skill sets. New skills outside of their expertise can be learned, but in-game time needs to be spent on this. A large part of this system is the player characters' ability to augment themselves with cyber-technology and their ensuing loss of humanity as they become more machine than human.

Cyberpunk 2020 claims to lend itself to play in the street level, dark film noir genre, but certain aspects of the basic system can influence game sessions toward a high body-count, 1980s action movie style.

Although each player must choose a character class or "role" from those given in the basic rules, there is enough variation in the skill system so that no two members of the same class are alike. Because Cyberpunk 2020 is skill-based, the choice of skills around the class-specific special ability allows a wide range of character development choices including non-combatants.

The combat system, called "Friday Night Firefight", emphasizes lethality. Several pages in the rules are devoted to discussing real combat vs. the illusions often seen on TV. Attempts are made to keep the combat as realistic as possible in a game setting. No matter who the character is, a single bullet can result in a lethal wound. This encourages a more tactically oriented and thought-out game play, which is in accordance to the rough-and-gritty ethos of the Cyberpunk genre. Also, the amount of damage a character can sustain does not increase as the character develops. The only way a character can become more damage-resistant is to either become better at not being hit, physically augment their body with muscle (trained or implanted) or cybernetics, or wear armor.

Firestorm was supposed to be the bridge between Cyberpunk 2020 (the 2nd edition rules and milieu) and Cyberpunk V.3 (the 3rd Edition rules and milieu). Its purpose was to shake up everything and get players prepared for the new background they were cooking up.

Set in 2023, the backstory has two deep-ocean-based megacorporations dueling for control over a third one (the period known as the "Ocean War"). When it escalates into open warfare, they each hire mercenaries. One hires the Japanese diversified technology and security services firm Arasaka and the other hires the American military technology and mercenary services firm Militech.

During the conflict, the long-standing bitter rivalry between Arasaka and Militech causes them to forget about their customers and go for each other. In the beginning they feud quietly (the phase called the "Shadow War"). But the covert war between the two heats up, becoming the Fourth Corporate War.

In the course of the adventure setting, the characters are hired to hunt down a pesky netrunner who is making their anonymous employer unhappy. Little do they realize that the hacker is the infamous (and already "dead") Rache Bartmoss. Regardless of what they do, their employer pinpoints the apartment with an orbital mass-driver and vaporizes it.

Set in 2024, the second part of the Firestorm series sees Arasaka mobilize the Japanese Defense Force to take on Militech and the American military in a series of "proxy conflicts" (the phase dubbed the "Hot War").

Waves of cyberviruses corrupt databases worldwide, leaving the isolated Arasaka Towers arcology in Night City the last viable data storage mainframe in the world.

Militech gathers together the surviving meta-characters and a Special Forces team played by the player characters into a "super team". Their job: to take out Arasaka's Night City arcology with a tactical nuke to deny its assets to Arasaka.

Then they find out that Alt Cunningham, who was captured by Arasaka earlier, is trapped inside the mainframe. Of course, Johnny won't let Alt die a second time, so the team tries to break her out.

The end result is that the meta-characters go out in a blaze of glory. Johnny Silverhand dies at the hands of Arasaka's cyborg assassin Adam Smasher in order to buy Spider Murphy enough time to break Alt into a series of datapackets and downloads her into the Net. Morgan Blackhand then takes on Adam Smasher atop Arasaka Towers while the rest of the team gets extracted out. The outcome of the duel is greatly disputed because the low-yield tactical nuke the team deployed sets off the 2-kiloton "self destruct" bomb Arasaka had placed in its data core. This destroyed much of downtown Night City and contaminated the ruins and anything downwind of it with lethal fallout.

The long-awaited third volume, Aftershock promised to tie all the loose ends together and herald the end of the old Cyberpunk 2020 (or "Cyberpunk V.2") game world and usher in the beginning of the new Cyberpunk 2030 (or "Cyberpunk V.3") game world. It was later cancelled and its material was folded into the Cyberpunk 203X rules book.

Cybergeneration takes place in an alternate future of the core Cyberpunk 2020 timeline, where a nanotech virus epidemic has resulted in a subgroup of teenagers with unusual, superhuman skills. It began as a supplement that still required the Cyberpunk 2020 rulebook, but the second edition became a standalone game.

Ever since the 1998 release of the Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook Firestorm: Shockwave, fans of the game had been waiting for a third edition of the Cyberpunk game, known as Cyberpunk 203X. Over the years, the entire project had at times been discounted as vaporware, its delays due to other projects and Pondsmith's involvement in the development of The Matrix Online.[citation needed]

The game was released first in PDF form on December 17, 2005 and as a conventional book on January 15, 2006.

The setting has been heavily updated from its last event book series, Firestorm, which covered the opening of the Fourth Corporate War. The aftermath of the Fourth Corporate War has resulted in widespread corruption of the Net and major losses of hard-copied data, to the point that all data is intangible and recent recorded history is in doubt. An example that pops up in Pondsmith's demos at conventions, releases on the Internet, and in the finished game is that history has become so corrupted that many people in the world now believe Richard Nixon, instead of resigning over Watergate, committed suicide on camera and that memes such as the moon landing being hoaxed become prevalent.

The war has also led to the collapse of nations, the world economy, and many of the staple megacorporations. This civil upheaval leads to the rise of the "altcults", alternative cultures similar in vein to the "phyles" from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. In fact, Cyberpunk V.3 has more to do with the new postcyberpunk literary movement and transhumanism than with the Gibson-Sterling mirrorshades movement.

In addition to rules changes to the Fuzion system and background, Cyberpunk V3.0 also uses concepts taken from Pondsmith's experience at Microsoft with computer and video games as well as corporate culture, such as a simpler character generation system using templates, web-based active content URL links for updates, and making groups, organizations, and corporations their own "characters".

In addition, there is also the Fallen Angels, space-bound scavengers, the Ghosts, people who have uploaded their minds, and the Neo-Corps, the surviving corporations of the Cyberpunk 2020 world that now exist in the form of organized crime syndicates. However, the six listed above are the only ones that have been mentioned in any deep detail. Only the Edgerunners Altcult had a published sourcebook released.

On January 25, 2018, R. Talsorian Games announced an updated edition for Cyberpunk 2020 called Cyberpunk Red, which is currently in active development.[2]

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Cyberpunk 2020 - Wikipedia