One of my friends, who'll be playing in my upcoming shadowrun campaign, expressed the opinion that it would be more interesting/entertaining if the megacorps in my game where named after real corps from the present day, rather than just having bought those corps out. I'm not 100% sold on the idea, but I admit it might help me and my players remember which corp is which.

Thus, I ask the folks with more free time and shadowrun knowledge than myself, which SR Megas came from which present day corporations?

If I remember in an older edition that there was links to pre-2012 corps and sixth worlds ones. I know I have read about it some where, and when I find it I will provide the links.

I'm prety sure most Megacorps have ties to RL corps.
Saeder Krupp is a true compagny in Germany (and Krupp was building amunition for the third reich ...)
Fushi bought Sony from memory.
Ares is a continuation of General motors.

Shiawase has no equivalent, as the background story needed the Shiawase decision ...
Same for Aztechnology, you cant have an equivalent as it is tied to really specific background (while you could find roots in big mexican or south american corps)

Also, remember that the 2029 crash was cataclysmic for the corporate world, and most modern day corps did not survive it.

Close.
The current incarnation of Krupp is called ThyssenKrupp AG.

Mitsuhama comes close to being Mitsubishi. I know I've called it the wrong name a few times in game.

MicroDeck is the remains of Micro$oft. Thrown from it's great throne by Crash 1.0.

Sony is still around, and still putting out products (BBB, Page 336). Yamaha is still around, and branching out into other markets (BBB, Page 307). Who knows what's really happening with Ford-Lincoln-Mercury, are they still their own company, are they just a holding company for someone in the Caribbean, will they ever get the Mustang line again after selling it to Nissan (From The Shadows)?

Evo just renamed itself, and you don't argue with a Manga-Addicted Free Spirit over what she names her company! Otherwise she'll demonstrate that, yes, the average human body contains eleventy-billion gallons of blood!

Fuchi/Novatech/NeoNet has renamed itself so often... OY!

Budweiser is still around, putting out Soyweiser.

Mitsuhama isn't Mistubishi. Mitsubishi is still around in 2065 according to SoA.
You can take a look at Nath's Corporate Index which has all corps that has ever been mentioned in Shadowrun, including some existing one.

I said comes close, I didn't say was.

I said it isn't, I didn't say you said it was.

The world's largest corporations today are usually holding companies for smaller ones with names that few people outside the business world have heard of. For the sake of simplicity and easily recognizable names, I view these to be the RL modern day equivalents to the SR megacorps:

Ares Macrotechnology = General Motors
Mitsuhama = a mash-up of Mitsubishi and Toyota
Saeder-Krupp = a mashup of DaimlerChrysler and BMW
NeoNET = a mashup of Apple, IBM, AT&T, and Samsung
Evo = a mashup of UPS, FedEx, and Merck
Horizon = a mashup of Time-Warner and NewsCorp
Aztechnology = Wal-Mart
Shiawase = BP/Dutch Oil
Wuxing = Bank of China

Actuallly, that was Saeder, an ammunitions manufacturer that's still operating. Krupp is one of Germany's lading heavy industry conglomerates and dabbles in everything that makes heavy industry, from steel mills to industrial machinery design and production. They're also investing in regenratives. They have some arms production still, but compared to earlier times, that's almost nothing. They've teamed up with Thyssen to remain competitive and, thus far, haven't been gobbled up by one of the really huge HI conglomerates.

Ares, effectively, is OCP. It's the military-industrial complex of America. It's Honeywell, General Electric, General Motors, and Raytheon rolled into one (actually, these companies have all been named as subsidiaries of Ares in various SR publications). It also is Apple (an official Ares subsidiary!) and Oracle, Bell, AT&T, and Wal Mart. Oh yes, they also own NASA and half the US army, and propably all US mercenary companies. By all rights, Ares ought to be the biggest Mega, but that'd be countrary to 80s Cyberpunk tropes of divided states of America and imperial Japan and it's allmighty economy. Name-Wise? America, Inc. ... or General Industries. I personally would recommend OCP. It's such a perfect match.

MCT, Shiawase and Renraku are all archetypical japanese zaibatsu conglomerates. Real-Life approximations would be Sony, Mitsubishi, Kawasaki and Furukawa. Similarily, Eastern Tiger about is Hyundai.

Aztechnology is soemthing without a clear real-world equivalent. If you absolutly must rename it, I'd go for Umbrella, but really, Aztechnology is too tied into the setting to be changed in any fashion.

Horizon is the American media complex. It's Hollywood, News Corp, TimeWarner, and all the other studios merged into one company. Turner-Hollywood, inc.

Wuxing is ... well ... take any chinese conglomaerate you want, really. Or make one up. It's got no real equivalent either.

NeoNet has no realistically plausible equivalent, as it's the british industrial-military complex (British Industries), a crazy Biotech company, the main Dutch industries (Royal Dutch Shell), and an East Coast tech company (NeoNet) rolled into one. This propably is closest to the Umbrella Corp of Resident Evil fame. Of course, if you already named Aztech Umbrella ... try Blue Sun.

Saeder-Krupp is all of Germany's state-like monopolies - Deutsche Bahn, RWE, BASF, EnBW, E.ON and Deutsche Telekom rolled into one, adding the heavy industry conglomerates Evonik and ThyssenKrupp and Bayer, also the automobile companies, from Porsche to Volkswagen to BMW and Daimler. Further add to that Vodafone, British Telecom, Schweizer Genossenschaftsbank, Telecom Italia, and various biotech, tech, and smaller industry companies throughout (especially Eastern) Europe, as well as GazProm, Yukos, Ilyushin, MIL and Suchoi (officially, SK has pretty much a stranglehold on the russian economy, which is quite an irony, considering how it's more like the opposite in reality). This should be the second biggest Mega in existence. I'd propably go for Krupp AG or something like that by name, if you're going for the "Das Reich" angle of the company. Or Evonik, if it's to be more like Crazycorp.

Evo is ... well, a bit out there. It's all of the russian economy that isn't Saeder-Krupp's, plus most of the japanese economy that isn't another Mega, and some assorted fantasy companies. I'd stay with Evo for name.

See, now that's what I'm talking about. Coincidentally, that's also pretty much defeating my need for megacorp renaming as part of the need to rename them was that I had a hard time remembering the feel and purpose of each corp (except that Aztech really like magical power regardless of price tag...). Now you've gone an summed them up nicely for me.

By-the-by, who ended up owning Toyota? I feel I should know, so I know when to hum "Oh what a feeling..."

Aztech I always thought was that Mexican oil company.

Petroleos Mexicanos?

...Sure!

You could also roll Lockheed-Martin into Ares. Hell, take Northrop with it too while you're at it. Given that Ares ended up taking over NASA as well, seems likely they'd have a huge Aerospace division, and taking giants like Lockheed and Northrop would be good business.

IIRC Lockheed-Martin was still independant in 2065. I don't remember whether they were bought by Horizon, but I'm quite sure it has never belonged to Ares.

Aztechnology started out as O.R.O. (Ironically enough, no, not Oro, or Gold in Spanish), a Drug Cartel's Money Laundering Company that started making more of a profit than the drugs, and it went from there.

They got into Telecommunications, and got the contract for when Mexico decided to go to digital vote-from-home.

Let's see... Yeah, a bunch of Drug Cartel guys are going to be REAL honest about counting the votes which have no papertrail, right?

Shadowrun timeline diverges from our own as soon as 1977, with British Aerospace Company (BAC) and Hawker-Siddeley not merging into BAe. The former appears in the name of the good old BAC-Dassault-MBB EFA Variants, the later among Aztechnology subsidiaries in Corporate Download (a twist can be found for Hawker-Siddeley, which would require Aztechnology to buy Raytheon Aircraft).



Boeing and Lockheed are still around as independant companies at least nominally. Ares is the main components sipplier for both. On the other hand, according to Rigger 3, General Dynamics belongs to Ares Arms (not AresSpace). Raytheon wasn't, as far as I know, ever directly named in SR.




There's also a good chunk of inspiration drawn from Google.


The British Industrial-Royal Dutch merger is Regulus Joint Industries. Besides, British Industrial was in food, energy and mining. The british industrial-military complex (in other words, BAE) is IWS group.

The N of NeoNET stands for Novatech, the E for Erika and the T for Transys Neuronet. Novatech has a familial hi-tech companies feel (Microsoft, Apple and so on) although that does not reflect that much in its history. Erika is the merger of Ericsson and Nokia. Transys Neuronet is heavily into cybernetics, with no equivalent indeed nowadays.


Saeder-Krupp is known to dominate the aerospace, nuclear and oil industries, so you can add French companies Safran, Areva, GDF, Schlumberger and parts of Total to the mix.

Also, Volkswagen is still independent, and Daimler is part of IFMU. Only BMW and Porsche belongs to Saeder-Krupp. BMW is, actually, the original company on which the Saeder-Krupp megacorporation was built.


As far as SR history goes, Yamatetsu (Evo's old name) was first a merger of japanese and filipino companies, moving to Russia much later.


Chrysler-Nissan, according to Rigger 3, with a few details in Shadows of Asia about how it happened.

According to Dumpshock Wiki Daimler belongs to Chrysler-Nissan. It once was a subsidiary of IFMU - but since IFMU broke down after Crash 2.0 (detailed in the German System Failure)...

Ares Incorporated is a real firearms manufacturing company. They have been around since 1971, too, which maybe where Ares came from.

Possibly though I find it more likely the original developers wanted a name that evoked, y'know, war.

After all, we know that Peace Sells (But Whose Buying?).

War, however, war always makes a profit.

One of the greatest fictional weapons-suppliers of all times: Military Armament Research Syndicate. MARS! Owned by Destro of GI Joe fame.

Well, we have Trubble Bubbles now, so why not?

It was supposed to be the Mediene cartel since they were the big bad guys when SR came out.

Thanks DLN, couldn't remember who they were supposed to be. Just knew they were a Drug Cartel.

Ares = Haliburton.

Just throwing that out there.

As far as I know, the cartel things in Aztechnology historical background doesn't show up before the 1995 Aztlan sourcebook. It precisely refers to the Medellin cartel, along with made-up David and Masaya cartels from Panama and Nicaragua (the Colombian Cali cartel is also mentionned, but isn't involved in ORO). The letters ORO stand for Juan Ortega, Julio Ramos and Diego Oriz, the heads of those cartels.

Didn't Otega, RL die in a hail of bullets from police who were in the shoot first and skip the questions mind set?

... which, according to London, is a subsidiary of BI.


Good Point. Come to think of it, Hollywoogle.com would be a good alternative name for Horizon ...


And, according to Runner Havens, they bought up a bunch of nautics and general industry combinates there.


Yeah, though Total-Elf are part of GIAT and/or ESPRIT. The Oil stuff is more because of their massive Middle eastern investments, I'd suppose.


Wasn't Volkswagen supposed to be an EMC company, and EMC an SK subsidiary? Anyway, that might be another German-only not-quite-canonic piece of info.


MUCH bigger than that.


I'd think so. On a roof while making a hasty escape, IIRC.

I'm pretty sure the London sourcebook doesn't say that. BI and IWS have a common shareholder, Justin Carmichael. IWS capital is also held by Edward Symington and George Matthews, and supposedly as much as 30% by Ares Macrotechnology. No reference to BI owning IWS that I could find. Honestly, I'd be quite disappointed by my work, had I missed such fact.


Saeder-Krupp owns GIAT, GIAT owns shares in Esprit, and Esprit owns Total-Elf. Having wrote that part, the idea was to have various guise under which Seader-Krupp would dominate Europe (and the middle east oil industry in that case) instead of having it just owning everything plainly. In this case, Total-Elf is still around, but nearly all its oilfields would be joint-ventures with S-K. Lofwyr gives the money and pulls the strings, Total-Elf does the day-to-day work, and Lofwyr got oil back.


According to Germany SB and Rigger 3, the European Motor Company is made of Peugeot, Citroën, Skoda, Opel, Jaguar, Range Rover and DAF, and the Ford Motor Company owns it. According to the Germany SB, Volskwagen belongs to the Deutsche Treuhandstalt Finanztransaktions-und consulting ÖAG.

All restaurants are Taco Bell.


Following the franchise wars.

Pablo Escobar was the drug czar shot and killed while crossing a roof, fleeing a police raid.