“We recommend you print and assemble the zines for the most authentic and enjoyable Expanuks experience,” the game says. The file is actually a printable PDF with instructions on how to assemble it in the real world. “That’s the sense we tried to capture.”Įxapunks starts when a hacker named Ghast knocks on the player's door and gives them a magazine called Trash World News that serves as both the game's instructional manual and lore book. “In the days of the actual cyberpunk movement, the late 80s to early 90s, the emphasis was much more on ‘punk’ in the sense of someone who stands in opposition to big systems of control,” he said. It’s about more than just the aesthetic of neon signs and dark alleyways. Just as important to Exapunks is the idea of being a punk. “Of course, the idea that being a hacker could be cool was practically enshrined for us and many others in the movie Hackers,” Barth told me over email. Exapunks writer Matthew Burns read Wired and other cyberculture magazines. He went to DEF CON-a yearly hacker convention-to do research for the game. Zach Barth-founder of Zachtronics-grew up reading 2600, a hacking magazine that’s also behind the HOPE conference, and would buy old computers at swap meets. Expaunks is steeped in 1990s Cyberpunk aesthetic. If it all sounds like a William Gibson novel, that’s the point. A mysterious computer program makes an offer-hack for me and I’ll keep you alive. The player character has the phage and needs medicine that costs $700 a day to stay alive. That’s the power of Exapunks, a game set in an alternate 1997, where a terrible plague called “the phage” is ravaging the population, computers run everything, and the players have to hack to stay alive. Clearing the small hurdle made me go from feeling like the dumbest person in the room to the smartest. After a few minutes of experimenting, I did. This was just the tutorial, but Exapunks expected me to mostly work it out on my own.
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