Just came across this one: Chinese police, Olympic security drill (from YearTopic.Com - Beijing Olympic 2008).

And it occurred to me that there must be other pictures from real life that make you think Shadowrun.

Joe Nishizawa's photos of the Tokyo Underground.

Awesome pictures.

..I always liked this one:

AT&T Long Lines building NYC

I actually used several photos of this building as visual aids for the SSID Headquarters in Beograd in my RiS campaign. Really intimidated the players especially when they saw the street level entrance (I actually used an image of a service entrance that just screams "bunker like" security).

Here's another cool one from the Big Apple...

Westin Building (yes this is a real photo & not CG).

and two perspectives of one from Shanghai:

Jing Mao Tower - day
Jing Mao Tower - night

The night shot almost makes it look like it's from some film.

I'd love to use those as visual aides in my games, but I have no idea what situation I'd use them in.

Iconic Prime runner?

Blade Runner = SR.

Tokyo hotspots at night (which look like Blade Runner sets):

Shinjuku
Shibuya
Central City

Those links are blank for me.

Fixed, I think...

Shinjuku
Shibuya
Central City

And if that doesn't work, try copying the url into a new browser tab.

i suspect the problem are the ,'s in the urls...

It is the commas. Here are the links using TinyURL.com as a workaround:

• Shinjuku _{(based on http://wallpapers.bpix.org/wallpapers/63/S...kyo,_Japan.jpg)}
• Shibuya _{(based on http://wallpapers.bpix.org/wallpapers/63/S...kyo,_Japan.jpg)}
• Central City _{(based on http://wallpapers.dpiq.net/wallpapers/63/C...kyo,_Japan.jpg)}

The CCTV building in Bejing:

• Daytime
• Nighttime
• Overview

still having trouble at my end in viewing any of the links.
Though then again, I did visit japan this summer and went up tokyo tower at night. That was amazing.

[yoda]
Based in part on certain East Asian cities, Blade Runner's visuals were.
[/yoda]

Thanks for the fixes, very cool. I love the CCTV building, that would be fun to make a run through.

This one does it for me...

Blackwater Mercs

Just the fact that guys like this are hired by corporations, are packing full-auto weapons, have no real governmental oversight, and doing the bidding of their corporate sponsors who are more worried about the almighty dollar than anything else is about as SR as I want to get.

Their parent corporation even sounds evil. "Blackwater! Bwa-ha-ha-ha!"

PS: Here are the actual links for the Tokyo pics. I have no idea why they were being so hinky. Just copy add http:// at the front of the URL and paste. That works. Gah!

Shinjuku - wallpapers.bpix.org/wallpapers/63/Shinjuku_at_Night,_Tokyo,_Japan.jpg
Shibuya - wallpapers.bpix.org/wallpapers/63/Shibuya,_Tokyo,_Japan.jpg
Central City - wallpapers.dpiq.net/wallpapers/63/Central_City_at_Night,_Tokyo,_Japan.jpg

These are my pics

Favela in brazil
a closer pic
sprawl utility servies
Indian slum for shadow marketplace
malasian slums
here is a nice one with large buildings
a house in the barrens
here is a nice contrast
some more roted out city pics
this would be LA
nature strikes back

i like the gritty side of shadowrun

makes one wonder how short the distance is from riches to rags, if it comes to that...

btw, your LA picture is 404.

Blade Runner pulls a lot from Hong Kong as well. For example, the Chungking Mansion in Hong Kong (it's like a broken-down arcology):

Streetside
The Front
Courtyard
Interior Halls
The Trendy Hipster Part

Other images that make me think Shadowrun:

A gated community in Malaysia.
A Sao Paulo favela. Hello Barrens!
A restaurant in South Central Los Angeles. With a barb wire roof, naturally.
The Bronx ghetto. And again.
A Blackwater employee. Stick some tusks on him and you've got yourself a SR 1st edition ork merc!

On the sunnier side, ultra modern skyrakers also give me the Shadowrun vibe:

Dubai's financial center. And the Burj Al Arab, of course. Friends of mine are from the UAE and they say you can actually feel it swaying in the wind.
The Shanghai Financial Center.

Some of the links, like the courtyard and the interior halls are not working for me.

Weird. I hate people who don't use appropriate web standards in their URLs. Try a copy and paste into your browser address window:

lh4.ggpht.com/_rFcPV4nb3Ic/Rvh4WBBvKvI/AAAAAAAACLE/pwAhlX9bbQQ/hk+shenzhen+shanghai+012.jpg

lh5.ggpht.com/_8u-IrrT6jfU/SGj1TNAoW9I/AAAAAAAACa4/Rig79UfQX1I/DSCN1554.JPG

Rocinha is in Rio de Janeiro. Try going to google maps and give a quick look trough São Conrado, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

i have to remind myself that the first one is from bronx, new york. it looks more like some bombed out part of the balkans.

how is something like that even possible in whats supposed to be the most powerful nation on earth?!

ugh, i cant stop wonder how short the distance is to ruin if society fails...

Oops, that was Rochina. Here's Favela Morumbi in Sao Paulo. Talk about the rich butted up against the dirt poor.

I would like to add that it isnt like that all over brazil, but the poverty percentage is alot bigger.

Here some more pics.

more bronx
converting something nice into a slum
trashy
some love income apts
hideout
slums in cairo
more slums
burned out building
burma
highrise

and a nice corp bulding in istanbol

Looks more like acid rain or general air pollution damage. That's what happens to many historic European buildings unless they get regular scrub downs.

Looks like you're also suffering from busted links like me.

ok, now i really have a image of how the barrens may be like. creepy!

A few more

A NYC cityscape
The LA view
A destroyed house in Philly
Another destroyed house
Coming out of the ork underground?
A New Orleans Bar.
Palermo at night.

Shadow of the Needle
Accustomed to Concrete

But that's cheating, I guess, because I *took* the photos thinking of Shadowrun.

Awesome photos! Now you need to add the new buildings with a Wacom.

Largely thanks to the wonders of rent control. And the inability/unwillingness of the city to keep addicts/dealer out of buildings/neighborhoods. I'm told that when the Dominicans moved in, bought property and simply killed addicts and dealers who annoyed them or their customers that things got better.

ah, the lovable right wing heavy handed ethics...

funny enough, i love the images of city skylines by night, but at the same time i get a creepy feeling thinking about the stuff that may be going on in the darkness between those buildings...

yep, pretending to be a cold-hearted shadowrunner is one thing, living it is another...

One of the things I find most interesting about the nature of The City in cyberpunk is that it has to be exotic by definition. An ordinary city just doesn't cut under ordinary circumstances. It has to be fetishized, on some level, so that there can be "a million stories in the naked city". Looking at Tokyo, I've always been under the impression that This Is It. The Big City. And I think the same is true of a lot of westerners. Yet when they were making Ghost in the Shell, Newport City was festooned with Chinese and the occasional spatter of Russian - because that's what it took for them to exoticise their own city. And I think that's really interesting and cool.

I mean, I live in Seattle, and I drive a cool car, and I'm connected to the internet 24/7 and I can see where the Arcology's would be, and where the ork underground would grow around. It's almost a cliche proto-cyberpunk existence. But even I can't see this city as a cyberpunk Big City unless I start imagining where the Other is gonna creep in.

I can't help but think that Moscow - with it's gross divide between rich and poor, blossoming tech industry, rampant crime, and old-world ex-soviet mystique - is gonna be the next Big Cyberpunk City in media.

what really gets me going are when you see narrow streets with buildings on either side, and the room between covered in wires and signs in all kinds of script, to the point where you could start to wonder where the sky is...

that and alleys and roads going off in all kinds of directions.

all this basically scream a living city. a city thats beyond control of some planners office.

problem is that such a environment is a haven for predators of all kinds. to many places to hole up and attack from...

Although nowhere near as tall the buildings in SR, I spent time in various cities in Peru for two years. There are plenty of places like that were you can't figure out how to get to them from the street but if you find an alley you can get to the center of the block where there is more interesting stuff.

At night; however, ...

This is the barrens to me

http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&...G=Search+Images

I have been there and any searches you do on Katutura, which is basically outside of Windhoek (the capital of Namibia.) About 150k people in nothing but tin and even cardboard shacks for miles. It was a sobering experience, and if anything was the image of the barrens Katutura would be it.

They're no Hell's Angels but they're the bosozoku aka "Speed Tribes", the original go-gangers. And girl gangers. Plus white-chick cosplayer wannabe.

Hello Augmented Reality! Blending video game iconography into real life.

that last one was interesting. especially the one with the names about peoples heads.

a very nice example of AR broadcast info in use

some sprawl impressions

http://img230.imageshack.us/my.php?image=73906686wl4.jpg
http://img170.imageshack.us/my.php?image=a...agoillinqc1.jpg
http://img383.imageshack.us/my.php?image=t...hongkongga8.jpg

an idea of how awakend lands could look like...

http://img114.imageshack.us/my.php?image=53686304kg6.jpg

and the star on patrol

http://joeshaw.org/images/riot-police.jpg

love your second sprawl image

and that riot police one give me chills...

Nighttime in the sprawl:
Atlanta
Berlin (check out all the Smart cars!)
London
Los Angeles
Seattle (from the Space Needle)

I don;t like saying this, but the good ole USA isn't as powerful as she used to be, and yet she is. As a contact told me the other day, "She has forgotten how to compete; grown fat and content on the salary of her megacorp bosses". Look @ New Orleans after Katrina. 3 years later and it is still not fixed. Heck they were barely ready for a category 3 storm. We don;t even have that much military power. If we wanted to engage anyone else right now, we couldn't do it. Russia knows this, Iran knows this, heck all our enemies know this. We need to find away to fix this country, and I don;t think any of the leaders running can do.

I apologize for hijacking the thread. now back to your regularly scheduled programming currently in progress.

Rio de Janeiro aka. Metropole sprawl. Nice contrast of the two internationally famous landmarks - Christ the Redeemer, Sugarloaf Mountain - and the AAA/AA neighbourhoods around the beeches and the thin strip of houses going up the hill just above the left hand which is apparently a favela so close by.

Speaking again on the "foreign being required to be the City" in a cyberpunk sense...
And speaking to Wesley Street's photo of Los Angeles...

LA is the only city I've ever been in where it was always home and always foreign at the same time. Maybe it was because I didn't grow up there, but I was always visiting as a kid, because my grandparents lived there. And I know it like the back of my hand, having spent tons of time later in life just bumming around it... But it always had that sense of other because it was so vast.

Like you could find another world just by scratching the surface - letting the unseen world around you come boiling out.

I think that may be the required component for a real Sprawl. The sense that everywhere around you, something amazing and terrible could be happening... And you'd never know.

Here is the chapel at the colorado springs Air force cadet academy. Chaple front view and Chaple side view

I've been trying to find unique art deco images of New York City, something that would reflect how it's been rebuilt from the ground up into a neo-futurist art deco scheme in Shadowrun, and these are the best I've been able to find so far:

Turn of the Century
Chrysler Building Details
Art Deco Lobby
Western Union Building
Bas Relief

If anyone can find anything better, please share!

take that sense an go ^10 or something and your may have the seattle metroplex sprawl in SR. as in, so big and yet so compact that no single being can take it all in or claim to know the place.

and that kind of scale may make it even more tempting to sign up with some corp walled garden, if you at all can.

hell, i register a local trend among young families. while your on your own, the city is fun and entertaining, but ones you have a family to take care of, you try to move to a more quiet area. then as the kids grow up they want to rebell and stretch their wings, leading them into the urban areas again, and the cycle goes on...

reminds me of this place:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d..._in_Tromsoe.jpg