Mike Pondsmith

He earned degrees in psychology and graphic design at the University of California, Davis.⁠[1]

He has said he designed games as a child; after Dungeons & Dragons he wrote a science fiction game, Imperial Star, which he called his own version of Traveller.⁠[2]

He worked for the video game company California Pacific on early Ultima games.⁠[3]

He founded the game publisher R. Talsorian Games, which its website says was founded in 1985.⁠[4]

He has developed most of the company’s roleplaying games since its founding, which some sources date to 1982.⁠[5]

By his own account, he wrote his first roleplaying game in 1984.⁠[6]

That game was the mecha game Mekton; he recalled that he could not read the Japanese Gundam manga he had and filled the gaps with his own ideas.⁠[2]

R. Talsorian Games calls Mekton the first giant robot setting published in the United States; it followed with Teenagers from Outer Space.⁠[4]

He has said his favourite story is Blade Runner and that the first cyberpunk novel he read was Walter Jon Williams’s Hardwired; when he began in 1987 the genre was not yet established, and he set the game in 2013.⁠[1]

He recalled visiting strange bars in San Francisco in the late 1980s that were “amazingly cyberpunk.”⁠[7]

In 1988 he released the tabletop roleplaying game Cyberpunk.⁠[8]

In 1990 he released a new edition, Cyberpunk 2020Cyberpunk (tabletop role-playing game)Cyberpunk is a tabletop roleplaying game line designed by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games since 1988, with editions including Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk V3.0 and Cyberpunk RED; its setting was later adapted by CD Projekt RED into the video game Cyberpunk 2077.Open the full entry.⁠[9]

In 1994 he released the roleplaying game Castle Falkenstein.⁠[10]

It won the Nigel D. Findley Memorial Award in 1995.⁠[11]

In 2000 he returned to video games as a design manager at Microsoft Game Studios.⁠[11]

By his own account, he had made his living from roleplaying games for 16 years.⁠[6]

In August 2004 he was working at Monolith on the online game The Matrix Online.⁠[6]

He later recalled that his main thing on the game was wandering around the city.⁠[12]

In January 2005 he planned to publish the third edition’s core book, then a referee’s toolkit, then a sourcebook every other month.⁠[13]

Cyberpunk V3.0 was written by him with Lisa Pondsmith and Will Moss.⁠[14]

He taught game design at the DigiPen Institute of Technology.⁠[15]

In 2006 he was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design.⁠[16]

In the early 2010s he met a group of game creators from Poland.⁠[11]

On May 30, 2012, CD Projekt announced a new game based on Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk, saying it had acquired the rights directly from the author, who was collaborating on development.⁠[17]

He said at the time: “CD Projekt Red is the team we’ve been hoping for.”⁠[18]

In October 2012 the game was named Cyberpunk 2077, with Pondsmith helping on it.⁠[19]

The first Cyberpunk 2077 teaser trailer was released on January 11, 2013.⁠[20]

In mid-2015 R. Talsorian Games announced a tabletop adaptation of The Witcher, led by Pondsmith’s son Cody Pondsmith.⁠[21]

It debuted at Gen Con on August 2, 2018, with Lisa Pondsmith contributing as a lore expert.⁠[22]

At Gamelab 17 in Barcelona he said the vision for Cyberpunk 2077 was “pretty close” to what he had imagined years earlier, and that he and Adam Badowski had spent a week working out how to implement its classes.⁠[23]

He recalled that Cyberpunk had once been licensed in Poland, where he expected to sell only a few copies, and that those readers turned out to work at CD Projekt RED.⁠[24]

He said he travelled to Poland two or three times a year during Cyberpunk 2077’s pre-production.⁠[25]

He wrote the foreword to Designers and Dragons: the 80s, which has a chapter on R. Talsorian Games.⁠[26]

In May 2019 R. Talsorian Games said he was the lead developer and primary writer of the new edition, Cyberpunk RED.⁠[27]

In July 2019 he said he had turned down many studios and chose CD Projekt RED “because they cared.”⁠[28]

He also revealed that before Keanu Reeves’s casting as Johnny Silverhand was announced, his wife guessed it from his hint.⁠[3]

He received the Jerry Lawson Lifetime Achievement Award at the Black in Gaming Awards, held during PAX Online; he was then founder and CEO of R. Talsorian Games.⁠[29]

The Cyberpunk RED core rulebook was released digitally on November 14, 2020, and in print on November 19.⁠[30]

Cyberpunk 2077 was released on December 10, 2020.⁠[31]

He worked closely with CD Projekt RED throughout the game’s development.⁠[7]

He insisted the game’s guns be bulky, matte black and nasty-looking, and said: “Cyberpunk is a warning, not an aspiration.”⁠[12]

He lectured at the UCLA Game Lab; he was then chairman of R. Talsorian Games.⁠[8]

In February 2023 the Cyberpunk RPG he launched in 1988 was named to the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design Hall of Fame.⁠[32]

The handbook lore in R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Mission Kit, based on the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, was selected by him.⁠[33]

It was released on June 21, 2024.⁠[34]

At Digital Dragons 2025 he said he was less involved in the sequel than in Cyberpunk 2077 but still reviewed scripts and visited CD Projekt.⁠[35]

On a panel at the same conference he discussed fan fiction, saying fans will invent romances whether or not the story provides them.⁠[36]

On June 21, 2025, the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design announced that he had received that year’s Rick Loomis Service Award.⁠[37]

In November 2025, on a CD Projekt RED stream, he said he had been involved in Cyberpunk 2 throughout, and that developers had shown him what will happen in it and kept asking his views.⁠[38]

He wrote the introduction to the Cyberpunk RED sourcebook Night City 2045 and co-wrote its “Night City Facts” chapter with J Gray.⁠[39]

R. Talsorian Games: Official website: https://rtalsoriangames.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[4]