Cyberpunk'd: The Strange Story of Steve Jackson Games Vs. the Secret Service
- Liam Mills
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
The year is 1990, and Steve Jackson Games, Inc. is set to publish its debut sci-fi GURPS expansion GURPS Cyberpunk. The genre is still at its zenith: Just two years earlier, Mike Pondsmith’s legendary Cyberpunk TTRPG was published by R. Talsorian Games, which was shortly followed by Iron Crown Enterprise’s Cyberspace and FASA’s Shadowrun; Test screenings of the Blade Runner director’s cut were in the ether, ultimately leading to a renewed excitement in the franchise; and, with the rising tide of the Phreak hacker subculture now making its way into the tech sector, the cyberpunk genre as a whole is seeming a lot closer to reality than ever before.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc. has done their research, of course. William Gibson’s Neuromancer is all over this game, from its cyberwear rule systems to its intricate “netrunning” mechanics. They’ve even brought in a veteran of the tech scene, Loyd Blankenship, to collaborate on the game. GURPS has always been popular, and this game is set to be its most popular yet.
That’s when the secret service shows up.
Let’s go back a little to look at the life of Loyd Blankenship.
Born around 1964 in Austin, TX, Loyd was kind of destined to become a hacker. In early 1976 he moved to San Marcos where he, as many lonely, nerdy kids do - immediately gravitated to the nearest place to play computer games. This just so happened to be the computer lab at the Southwest Texas State University library, which at the time held a fairly standard array of mid-70s computers. He became familiar with these early computer systems, and upon being introduced to the 1971 Star Trek strategy game, began to teach himself BASIC so he could port his own copy of the game to the college library’s CompuColor computer. It wasn’t long before he gained access to Southwest Texas State University’s PDP-4 mainframe and, from there, hacked his first computer to continue playing his favourite games.
This was a very different era of computer technology. The most common form of hacking at the time was the aforementioned “Phreaking”, where hackers would use audio frequencies (such as those created by the free whistles that came in boxes of Cap’n Crunch) to bypass phone systems to make free long-distance phone calls. It was at the second ever Summercon - an early hacker convention in St. Louis, MO - that a young Blankenship (now going by the alias “+++The Mentor+++”) realised that, between himself and his fellow hackers, they had control of the entire American phone network. These hackers - consisting of charmingly-aliased folk such as The Leftist, Doom Prophet, Phantom Phreaker, Control C, Necron 99, and more - would soon go on to found the second iteration of the Legion of Doom.
Named for the somewhat corny villains that hassled the Superfriends, the Legion of Doom devoted itself to a singular goal: Mischief. They hacked everything from telecommunication servers to the Palm Beach County probation department, where they re-routed incoming calls to a New York sex hotline. In 1986, +++The Mentor+++ wrote what would become a seminal text in the hacker community. The Conscience of a Hacker, also known as the Hacker Manifesto, is a short and slightly pretentious piece outlining the rationale behind this growing hacker movement. The manifesto describes waves of young, disaffected teens; intelligent kids who find themselves bored with the “baby food” they’ve been “spoon-fed” throughout their education, hungering for “steak”. He describes a generation that feels “dominated by sadists” and “ignored by the apathetic”. The text would go on to be published in the ezine Phrack, where it gained a brief virality and was eventually picked up by the writers of the 1995 Iain Softey film Hackers¹.
Things perhaps got a little too real, however, with the leaking of a document titled “Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major Account Center”, also known as the E911. This document - which formally belonged to the telecoms company BellSouth - outlined how to access the E911 system, an enhanced phoneline that ensures emergency calls are prioritised over all other calls. The document was fished up by a hacker who went by the suitably hacker-y name Prophet, and was soon shared to The Phoenix Project, an online distribution service run by none other than +++The Mentor+++ himself.
Perhaps sensing the growing intensity of the hacking scene, Blankenship began to step back from the Legion of Doom in 1989. He took a job as a freelance game designer, and focused more on his love of electronica music. Eventually, he was hired by Steve Jackson Games to work on their new cyberpunk role-playing sourcebook, GURPS Cyberpunk.
And now, to the secret service.
Hacking was a big problem for the US government in the late 80s. Computers were a new frontier, and with new frontiers comes new crimes and all too few lawmen capable of preventing them. In 1990, the Secret Service began Operation Sundevil², a nationwide crackdown on illegal computer hacking activities. While the raid on Steve Jackson Games was technically not part of this operation, the fact that it coincided with the arrest of several Legion of Doom members and preceded a series of raids spanning fifteen cities does suggest that the Secret Service’s operations here were a sort of pilot programme for the crackdown to come.
On the morning of March 1, 1990, Steve Jackson Games employees arrived at the office to find its entrance barred. The Secret Service left several hours later with three computers, two laser printers, over two dozen floppy disks, and the master copy of GURPS Cyberpunk. When pressed for comment, the Secret Service asserted that the game - which was three weeks from launch - was a “handbook for computer crime”.
The company’s founder - the perhaps predictably named Steve Jackson - approached the Secret Service demanding the company’s property be returned. He was initially told that they would receive their property the following day, and in later statements it was revealed that the Secret Service could have duplicated all material required for an investigation in approximately eight days. The Secret Service held onto the confiscated material for four months.
The impact to the company was devastating. The GURPS Cyberpunk manual had to be re-written largely from memory and pre-existing drafts, and the company was forced to lay off nearly half of its staff. An estimate of the raid’s total damage to the company placed the figure at around $125,000 (approximately $310,000 in today’s money). Steve Jackson Games Inc. was screwed, and so they did the one thing no-one thought they would do.
They sued the shit out of the Secret Service.
The resulting trial involved Steve Jackson and three other employees at the studio, who claimed that in addition to the unlawful seizure of their work equipment, they were also victims of invasion of privacy. Perhaps sensibly, Loyd Blankenship was not party to the suits. The trial eventually reached court in 1993, and against all odds the company won.
Transcripts from the trial are scathing: Judge Sam Sparks, who oversaw the trial, criticised the Secret Service’s warrant for not meeting the already flimsy standards they would normally require to justify a raid. Judge Sparks goes on to accuse Secret Service Agent Tim Foley, who led the investigation, of not adequately considering the financial ramification of the raid on Steve Jackson Games, concluding that Foley “just had no idea anybody would actually go out and hire a lawyer to sue you”. Steve Jackson Games was awarded over $50,000 for damages sustained by the raid and the retention of property belonging to the company. While several of the hackers adjacent to the case were charged for their part in the scandal, Blankenship remained untouched by the law.
In the aftermath of the case, Steve Jackson Games underwent what can only be described as a victory lap. They published several statements outlining the falsehoods and media hysteria that surrounded the case, and included a breakdown of the case as part of the released GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook. The front cover of the sourcebook would go on to feature a sticker proudly declaring it “The book that was seized by the US Secret Service”, and later printings would credit the Secret Service with providing “unsolicited comments”.
The question that stayed with me throughout my research into this topic is how much the Secret Service actually believed their own assertions that GURPS Cyberpunk was a textbook on committing cyber crime. Similar things have happened before: in 1939, the Futurians - a group of left wing science fiction writers including none other than Isaac Asimov - were raided by the Secret Service who believed them to be the centre of a counterfeit currency enterprise, and there have been countless instances of UFO enthusiasts being targeted by the FBI, CIA, and MI5 for their assumed connections to the USSR.
However, the raid on Steve Jackson Games was just one of several that occurred that day. Erik Bloodaxe (real name Chris Goggans) was also targeted, with the Secret Service threatening him with a pistol to the forehead before seizing a pretty meagre haul: some TV cable wires, a handful of phone parts, and a full-sized Pac Man arcade console. If the Secret Service truly did believe that the GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook was a training manual for the next generation of digital jihadists, did they believe the same of the infamous spherical menace of Pac Man? If you ask me, this raid was less about confiscating materials that could be used in court, and was more about intimidating any would-be hackers into submission; an attempt to target a nerdy hobby in the hopes of frightening any members of that hobby into toeing the line and behaving themselves.
It wasn’t all bad, of course. Steve Jackson Games eventually did recover from the raid, and the subsequent court case was one of the foundational events that led to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. GURPS Cyberpunk is largely considered a versatile and accessible alternative to the crunchier cyberpunk games on the market, and Steve Jackson Games would eventually go on to produce Munchkin, one of the most popular card games of the last thirty years.
In a way I wanted to discuss this case because it is, at its core, extremely cyberpunk. A bunch of no-good kids hacking their way through the world wide web, only to rouse the suspicion and ire of a bemused government of tech-illiterate fuddy-duddies is not only more cyber, but also significantly more punk than recent additions to the genre³. Also, in a time of government crackdowns centred on destroying what little free speech remains, it’s worth looking into the past and asking ourselves: Just when did we log into this particular server, and when is it too late to log off?
¹ A friend of mine - herself a hacker - tells me that this film is surprisingly accurate due to consultation from Eric Corley, more commonly known by his alias “Emmanuel Goldstein”.
² Corny names can be found on both sides of any conflict.
³ Cyberpunk 2077 is especially guilty of this: One of the first things you do in that game is act politely to a police officer.