Don't get me wrong - it's not the ultimate source of CP wisdom, attitude
or style; but Cyberpunk 2020 is still a damn fine roleplaying game.
Drifting into it back in my gaming days was one of the reasons i became so
interested in the whole movement. I jumped at the chance to play it - it sounded
pretty cool. Big corporations, nasty future, people with big guns in their
jacket. How could I resist? 
In the end i think the greatest enjoyment actually came from reading the books - not that the game wasn't good, it's just that the source books were an interesting read. Besides, the more you know about the game's setting, the more chance you generally have of enjoying the game.
The game is fleshed out well - the base set of character types was: Rockers, Solos (mercenaries), Netrunners (hackers), Techies/MedTechs, Medias, Cops, Corporates , Fixers (smugglers/fences/etc), Nomads (well-armed gypsies of the future). It's a good base, and you can twist a character around to pretty much whatever you like out of that set, or just make a new one. There's plenty of background, with sourcebooks covering everything from the people, places, equipment, the looks and the lifestyle. The writers try to push players into getting into the feel of things, making games tough, concentrating on the character and not the rules, and just generally getting cyberpunk.
There really isn't that much that i'd change about the game - perhaps the tone of the writing sometimes, but then i do tend to be picky about that sort of thing. Some Tim Bradstreet style illustrations would have been good, too ;) There was a little too much simple, clean-line drawings - not dirty enough for me. It is the dark future, after all...
the game
CP2020 - the original books at least - is based around the fictional Night City. You should be able to guess the year. In the original rule book, the authors deign to reveal the city's location; but later in the Night City sourcebook they place it on America's west coast, south of San Francisco, California.
The
America of CP2020 is just a touch different from what it is today - almost
no Governmental control, power lying with mega corporations instead. Corps
have their own Militia, and if that's not enough (or if you're going against
the corps) there are plenty of mercenaries for hire - from street ronin to
highly organised "Solo" teams. People have metal in their bodies - cybernetic
enhancements to make them both more and less than human. There are designer
drugs to rearrange your brain, braindance to put it back; cars, computers
and weapons plug directly into your mind; psychos, megastars, reporters and
rockers; high society and the lowest of low life. It's dirty, clean, violent,
sanitised and dangerous. All at once.
Meanwhile back at the farm, corporations have again reared their ugly head. Small farms were uneconomical, inefficient... so the corps offered to buy them all for their own mega-farms. When that didn't work they sent around muscle or wiped out the farmers' crops or stock with bioplagues. The end result was the advent of "Nomad" packs - displaced people who banded together to survive in a very harsh world, similar to gypsies of old... but definitely more heavily armed.
In
the city things are pretty dirty too. Corps have their usual amount of power,
while on the street gangs, Police and solos fight it out. Normal life elbows
its way around it all. No middle class - just rich and poor, extreme advances
in technology having had no calming effect on the increasing gap.
Under it all lies a vast 'net of information, inhabited by disembodied hackers - Netrunners. Netrunning should really have been the central aspect of the game, and if you count the pages it's given the most room in the book (yes, even more than weapons and combat). The problem was it was a complex system, and the teenage attention span didn't quite stretch that far. What we should have done was throw the dice and mechanics out the window, but we still weren't confident enough with RPGs to do so. In the end we concentrated more on the street and the corps.
Netrunning
was basically hacking projected into a world where people hooked directly
into their computers, via implanted plugs or 'trode sets. They move faster
than presently imaginable and can actually be killed by anti-intrusion software
(the infamous Black ICE). It's very cyberpunk, very Gibson (there's even a
referenec to William Gibson being the Patron Saint of the 'net :)). A cross
between virtual reality and the net as we know it now, cp2020's net
is no less dirty and hard than the street; big money can be moved around instantly
and electronically, people can be killed, people can be saved.
Mesh it all together and you've got a thoroughly enjoyable and generally very cyberpunk RPG. It was one of the things that got me so interested in the whole genre, and i still pull down the books from time to time and have a read.
I should also point out that the world of CP2020 uses a common currency..... called the Eurodollar. Eurobucks (prices are listed in eb, eg 1000eb) or Euro (eg "you want me to do this, you better pile on the euro..") for short. Interesting the way these things turn out. A common currency makes sense and isn't exactly a difficult prediction, but when it even turned up with the same name, I couldn't help noticing the parallel.
CP2020 is © Talsorian Games.