Uplink

[IamLEAM1983]

In 2001, the Internet wasn't all that removed from what it stands as today. Web page design standards were different, WebGL wasn't even a glimmer in anyone's eyes, Ask Jeeves was still called Ask Jeeves, Yahoo was on its first downward slump – but you could see how certain current standards were becoming common, back then. Flash was being used more and more often to create engaging online content, CSS was new and all the rage – we were transitioning away from the “Frames and raw HTML” era of the Web and still peeking around in New Media. In some ways, the Web was still a new and expansive place that allowed for several speculative discourses concerning its future. We haven't stopped trying to figure out what the Web of Tomorrow will be like, and that notion keeps changing on a yearly basis, but certain defunct “future pasts” still have their own mystique.

Uplink was released in 2001 by Introversion Software, a small British independent studio billing itself as “the last of the bedroom programmers”. Set in a then-futuristic 2010, the game posited that the future of the World Wide Web would be found in the breaking-off of the greater entity into several smaller corporate networks. Instead of a single browser potentially allowing access to the whole of the Web, we'd find ourselves surfing on dedicated platforms limited to our employing company's resources.

In short, Uplink's future takes place in a world where the Web as we know it only exists for domestic purposes, and is probably much cruder in scope than we're used to. On the corporate sphere, however, the Web now exists as the AWAN, a global network of closed-off corporate portals. To the average drone, only your own employer's portal is accessible. To agents of the Uplink Corporation – such as the player – the doors are laid wide open.

Well, in part. You're still a hacker in the traditional sense of the word, so get ready to bust down some proxy servers, decypher passwords and steal data to earn a paycheck! You're officially working as a security consultant, but the in-game lore makes it clear that everyone who's vaguely corporate knows that Uplink is where you turn to if you need to see a competitor suffer. The fiction establishes that Uplink protects its Agents by actually having them work through a remote gateway machine. This means that the very computer on which you run Uplink becomes a piece of the game's fiction – as you're technically using the company's provided gateway to spoof your way to your targets.

In clearer terms, this means you get to enjoy all of the hacking and suffer none of the consequences. If you get caught, the company disavows any knowledge of having ever hired you and closes your company-provided bank account. It's Game Over, but it's made clear that the player is never directly impacted. Just create a new profile and start over, if that happens.

Each profile comes with an entry-level gateway machine, a pre-generated bank account, basic hardware for said gateway, and about six or seven starting connection points. Uplink's Internal Services Machine is where you'll go to purchase software or hardware as needed, or in order to check up on a mission's corporate or political ramifications in the News Room. The game simulates a good hundred or so corporate entities, and you'll do everything between snooping around their privately-owned banks' accounts to stealing research data for your client of the moment – right down to crashing their entire system in a few Swordfish-esque keystrokes.

Understandably, the game isn't exactly what I'd call a stunner, by today's standards. The interface is cool, even downright cold, and absolutely matter-of-fact. You're looking at your gateway's OS even as it's located thousands of miles away, and it all generally feels like you're working in a pared-down Linux or Windows build that'd have been completely designed to cater to Hollywood Hacking clichés. You'll run into “Quadratic Algorithm Encryption Cyphers” and use your handy “Decrypter 4.0” tool to transform the cypher's jumble of cycling numbers into a neat grid of green zeroes. If you stop by the International Criminal Database (because Cyberpunk equals Centralized Law Enforcement, natch) and run a search for a man whose life you have to utterly ruin for your stipend's sake, you'll see a rapidly shuffing animation of the database's mugshots. All that's missing is a little electronic trill and some extraneous hurried keystrokes. Overall, there's not a lot of actual hacking, with only one mission type requiring of you that you bust down your target's defenses, access the server's command prompt and type in pretty basic UNIX-like commands. Stuff like “dir”, “cd pub”, “cd usr” and so forth. That's probably where the game grows to be at its most harrowing, seeing as the USR folder is always, always filled with huge files. You'll find yourself stuck waiting for that one last behemoth of a .DAT file to be erased by your methodically destroyed system, even as your trace tracker starts beeping faster and faster and faster...

When all works out as intended, you'll pop by the News Room one day later and hear that you've indeed managed to cost Such-and-Such Technobabble Inc. billions of credits, and that their financial and logistical recovery seems dubious.

Credits 'cause Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk equals Unified Global Currencies. Of course.

Fucking up in Uplink is ususally your fault and it usually involves not taking care of your active or passive traces. Active traces are what's making your Trace Tracker program beep ever-faster, like Beaker the Muppet on Crystal Meth. These can only be dealt with by disconnecting from your target system before the trace completes. Passive traces are what occurs once your target's realized that you've hacked it. Since you've left before it could finger you, they'll try and use their own logs to determine where your connection came from. To prevent that, you'll have to use one of several flavors of log-altering programs to erase your tracks. You'll quickly learn to spot public terminals and other low-security joints that can serve as adequate bouncing-off points for your hacking attempt. Keeping a good slew of Admin-level access points across the game's map allows you to increase your Active Trace countdown. In fact, you never should directly connect to a target, unless it's the recipient of files you've stolen from another company.

In short order, you'll be going around the world six times before connecting to a target machine that's about five miles south of your gateway's location. That means you absolutely have to learn to save an all-purpose secure route that you can repeatedly load with a single mouse click.

A bit like a Retro-Cyberpunk Skyrim, the game takes its sweet time in starting and then unfolding its narrative. There's a story, but it's entirely dependent on you opening the right email at the right time. Accidentally delete that one message you're likely to receive about five hours into the game, and you'll be forced to keep doing random missions. You can delay your investigation into Arunmor Corporation's illicit attempts at a Web-wide illegal and hostile takeover for as long as you like, and the various thresholds will wait as long as you want them to. If, on the off chance, you manage the Herculean feat of wiping off the entire corporate sphere's worth of files or steal everything that can be stolen, the game generates more content. It's basically like Skyrim's Radiant Quests, if only purely text-based and involving various low-to-high-security virtual heists. Plowing through the main quest, however, can take about an afternoon if you're fast enough in reaching the specific Uplink Rating that triggers the sending of that portentous email. It's a short game – but caution and patience willing, you'll be able to turn that short run into something that'll last dozens of hours more.

Interestingly, this is also one of the rare games out there that still relies on the most underestimated of all gaming peripherals – the pen and paper. If you're asked to find a particularly sneaky I.P. address for a client, you might have to jot it down. Querying a specific address for the associated company name doesn't come with a copy-and-paste function, so reporting back might involve your also transferring that info to paper before composing an email in-game. The most paper-intensive game type has to be the bank account query missions, in which you'll be asked to snoop on an unfortunate somebody's virtual purse, gain control over that account and transfer money to your client from that usurped account. Pair that with some unhelpful clients that only give you an account number or a name to start with, and you'll have to do a bit of sleuthing around the corporate sphere before being able to actually tackle the meat-and-potatoes of your agreed-upon job.

It doesn't help that while Uplink scales with modern resolutions, the end result can feel fairly pusillanimous. I.P. numbers become difficult to read (is that an 8 or a 9?), while big and blocky resolutions from yesteryear can be hard on the eyes.

On the subject of eyestrain, if the game's aquamarine-on-black tones ever grow too hard on the eyes, you'll find plenty of mods for it online. If you're of the mind that the game could use less buttons and more of an MS-DOS feel (where pressing Enter becomes essential), you can find a mod that reskins the game to fit that theme. If you're a Windows buff and would like the game to feel like Windows 98's twin from an alternate timeline, you can also do that. There's Linux skins for lovers of the little penguin's OS, and even more fanciful skins that don't really fit with any specific OS but that change up the visuals to a degree. The scope of the available mods is fairly large, going from zero-credit cheat Gateway setups that make the game's best supercomputer look like a babbling infant to an FBI-themed portal that's hack-ready and capable of generating its own missions, all the way to expansive Local Area Networks that make the game's own intrusion-ready LANs feel fairly small in comparison.

Today's games tend to treat hacking like a diversion, something to shove in on the side to add another minigame to the greater offering's roster of play systems. Even Watch Dogs, with its “hack everything” premise, never goes beyond one-button intrusions and Pipe Dream-esque flow-redirectiont puzzles. It's a game about a hacker and it's afraid to put hacking front-and-center, too preoccupied as it is with chasing GTA V's laurels. Uplink, on the other hand, knows exactly what it is and knows what it wants. The unlawful intrusion of corporate computer systems is what's put forward, and while some Hollywood clichés are still reinforced in its systems, this is as close as we've ever come to seeing a title that approaches the subject honestly. We've got a while to wait before Blendo Games' Quadrilateral Cowboy and North Rock Games' Disrupt, the former actually feeling like a true-blue successor to Uplink.

For now, this little unsung glory is the best we can hope for, as far as pretending the non-math-enclined among us actually are code monkeys capable of bending the World Wide Web to suit our needs – or bring it to its knees. Considering its ridiculously small asking price on Steam, this is a no-brainer for any thinking gamer, or anyone who feels like trying a non-standard puzzler.