Cyberside and the Games Industry

How much is Cyberside related to the gaming industry “for real”. Let’s dwell on that a bit.

The first Cyberside is quite obviously a homage to cyberpunk and dystopian classics, with a lot of 80s influence. At the same time, Bert Jennings and I did put quite a bit of our own experience into it. Back then, I was more optimistic about the gaming industry and tech in general. The book reflects that in a way. It asks fairly simple but important questions — how does tech influence us daily? What does it actually do to people?

At its core, it’s still an entertaining, allegorical road trip through the internet as we know it, just seen through that lens.

Creature of Darkness went deeper. The idea with the comic was always to tell the story of Cyberside from Matilda’s perspective. That meant going back and showing how the world — and specifically Fall Water Lake — ended up the way it did. To do that, we had to approach it partly through James’s perspective as well. That pulled the story into a much darker place. It became more dystopian, more philosophical, and less straightforward.

Cyberside: Level Zero sits somewhere else again. It was written during a period where the industry itself was going through a lot — mistakes at a corporate level, decline in certain areas, layoffs happening across studios . That inevitably fed into the tone.

The book leans much more into a political thriller space. It’s boardrooms, internal conversations, decisions being made behind closed doors, mixed with the original Cyberside story and speculative elements. Versa Foundation, for example, is very much our own version of a large private-equity-style entity — something a bit Umbrella-like.

Some people have asked whether I “Taylor Swifted” certain conversations — whether they’re based on real ones. The answer is yes, to a degree. But it’s not about pointing at specific companies. Versa and FWL are more like exaggerated, combined versions of things I’ve seen or heard over the years. Real enough to recognise, but pushed further.

Overall, the story isn’t finished yet, so it’s hard to define it cleanly. But Cyberside, for me, is a kind of mirror. It reflects my own experience in the game development industry over the years — not directly, but through observation, imagination, and a bit of deliberate dramatisation.

Tagged as: Aleksey Savchenko / Cyberside / Cyberside: Level Zero / games industry