Specific Cards

All Hands

• The card title comes from the phrase "All hands on deck!", which was originally a call to action to ship crews during an emergency.

• The artwork on this card resembles a screenshot of the popular first-person perspective texture-mapped computer games Doom and Doom II. The "Doom counters" given by this virus are obviously named for these games. The Doom games can also be played in multi-player "Deathmatch" mode, the source of inspiration for the flavour text of "Who's up for another Deathmatch 2020?"
• A card called Armageddon also exists in the Magic: The Gathering game.

• "Viacox" may be a thinly veiled reference to large media corporations, such as Viacom and Fox (or [USA company] Cox Cable). In fact, Cox Cable is owned by Viacom, having been bought out not long before Netrunner was released.

• This card's title is an interpretation of the common nick-name "BFG" for the largest and most powerful gun in the popular first-person perspective texture-mapped computer games Doom and Doom II. The usual interpretation of "BFG" is left to the reader's imagination.

• This card's title has a double meaning. A "bit" is the sharp, helically cut part of a drill which cuts the hole, or bores, into the substance being drilled. Another literal meaning of "boring bit" is a dull and unexciting passage of time. This pun is reinforced by the flavour text: "An effective drill, but pretty dull".

• The flavour text on this card reads "I can see clearly now my brain is gone." This is a play on the line "I can see clearly now the rain is gone" from the song I Can See Clearly Now by Jimmy Cliff. This song has also been covered by other artists many times.

• This Ice is named after the insect electrocution devices, commonly called "bug zappers" sometimes seen in public buildings, especially food stores.

• A Caryatid is a female statue used in place of a supporting column in classical Greek architecture. Examples can be seen on the famous Acropolis near Athens. The card's flavour text refers to Galatea - further information on Galatea can be found in this list.

• This huge piece of ice is a play on the Unix operating system error message "kernel failure". It may also be meant to be bigger than "Major Failure", which is an error message in some computer operating systems.
• The flavour text reads "War is the continuation of business by other means." This is a slight modification of von Clausewitz's axiom on war which says "War is the continuation of politics by other means." (Von Clausewitz is the West's answer to Sun Tzu, the Chinese philosopher who wrote The Ancient Art of War.)

• A card called Crumble also exists in the Magic: The Gathering game.

• The flavour text refers to "black-box" routines on discarded Corp data, which is a reference to the black box used to protect flight data on aircraft. Like some comedians say, "Why don't they make the planes out of the same stuff as the black box?"
• In electronics and computer sciences, a "black box" is some kind of circuit/code module of which you can only analyse the inputs and the outputs. You don't know what goes on inside and you can only guess it from the relation between the inputs and the outputs. Object Oriented Programming uses this approach a lot. You don't have to know how some code works if it does what you tell it to do.

• The flavour text for this card reads: "Getting at the honey sometimes means taking a sting or two." This, combined with the hexagonal pattern in the artwork show the card title is a pun on the word "honeycomb".
• The card title also sounds like a simple pun on the word "catacomb", meaning a large underground tomb or burial site.
• The card artwork contains the string "http//:homonick.com" which looks like a World Wide Web URL. The syntax is not quite right, however - in a real URl the colon precedes the double slashes. The URL "http://homonick.com" does not actually exist in real life.

• "Death From Above" or "DFA" is a term from the game BattleTech, where one Mech using jump jets trys to jump on the head of an enemy Mech.
• "Death From Above" is written on one of the helicopters in the Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now.

• This card's title was possibly inspired by the character Princess from Battle of the Planets (the highly edited Sandy Frank release of the Super Science Ninja Team: Gatchaman anime TV series). Princess had a special weapon that was referred to as her "Yo-yo Bomb".
• The card artwork shows a weapon which looks similar to the saw-edged yo-yo weapon used against James Bond in the film Octopussy.
• The flavour text reads:

"This is a trick I call 'walkin' the dog.' "

"Walking the dog" is the name of a trick which can be performed with a standard toy yo-yo.

• The card title is a reference to "The Deck" - a specific deck of Magic: the Gathering cards developed by Brian Weissman and used in Magic tournaments. The Deck is purported to be the closest thing to an unbeatable deck of Magic cards possible.

• The card title is a pun on the word "anaconda" - a type of South American python - replacing the "ana" (representing "analogue") with "digi" (representing "digital").
• The flavour text refers to the eating habits of anacondas. An anaconda seen in a zoo, etc.. will often have a large lump or two in its midsection which the zookeeper will explain is a whole chicken that the snake is still digesting.

• The Kludge counters used by this card get their name from a common computer programmer's term. A kludge is a makeshift piece of programming which solves a given problem quickly, but not in an efficient or entirely reliable way. To kludge a program is to fix it with a kludge.

• "Enterprise" refers to the USS Enterprise, a starship in the popular Star Trek TV/film/book/etc series. A common occurrence on board the Enterprise is for the captain to issue the command "Shields!" to activate the ship's damage shielding system.

• The flavour text reads: "Frack, Hans, end the run! It's the Food Fight!" This is a modification of the flavour text on the Magic: The Gathering card Lhurgoyf, which reads:
  "Ach! Hans, run! It's the Lhurgoyf!" - Saffi Eriksdotter, last words.
• This card is one of only the second Netrunner card to have the keyword "DecKrash". The first was "pi in the 'Face" from v1.0. Both these cards have references to food on them.

• In the Proteus expansion set fictional history, Max Forward was a netrunner who stumbled upon the mysterious Proteus files, thereby unleashing the strange new programs on the world.

• "Fubar" is a USA military slang term, deriving its spelling and meaning from the phrase "Fracked Up Beyond All Recognition". ("Fracked" is usually replaced with a different word, which will not be mentioned here as this is a G-rated web site.)
• It is also a common computer programmer's habit to name their test functions "foo", "bar", "foobar", "barfoo", "foobarbar" and so on... When you know that this originated in LISP and that it's a fully recursive language, you can guess how unreadable the code can get.

• Galatea is the name of a marble statue carved by Pygmalion, the King of Cyprus, in Greek myth. Pygmalion fell in love with his creation and the goddess Aphrodite took pity on him and brought Galatea to life.
• Galatea is also a moon of Neptune.

• This card's title alludes to the common computing saying "Garbage in, garbage out", or GIGO, referring to the principle that if you give any program bad data, it will produce bad results.

• Boxing announcer Michael Buffer is famous for using the catchphrase "Get ready to rumble" when introducing matches.

• "Revista" sounds like it is based on the construction "re-vista", which might mean to redesign something so that it has a different view, outlook, or appearance. This fits in with Herman's ability to rearrange the Ice on a data fort.

• Wizards of the Coast Netrunner Netrep Mark "Sparky" Schmaltz has revealed that this card was designed with a cost of zero bits.

• A card called Iceberg also exists in the Magic: The Gathering game.

• The card title is a reference to the traditional Tarot deck of cards. The Tarot deck is split into two sections, or arcanae: the minor arcana and the major arcana. "Lesser Arcana" may be a synonym for "minor arcana". The flavour text mentions a "wall of cards".

• Lockjaw is a muscular condition which may develop after a tetanus infection. The patient's jaw muscles sieze up until any movement of the jaw is difficult or impossible.

• The flavour text on this card reads: "I want him dead. I want his family dead. I want his deck dead!" This is based on a similar line from the film The Untouchables, uttered by the gangster Al Capone.

• Translated from French, this sysop's name is "Marc Of-Sun", which may be a reference to Wizards of the Coast's Netrunner NetRep, Mark "Sparky" Schmaltz.

• The original Minotaur was a mythical creature who inhabited a labyrinth on the Isle of Minos. Half-man, half-bull, the Minotaur demanded sacrifices of young people until it was slain by the Greek, Theseus.

• There is some partially obscured text in the card artwork. It reads:

Instructions: "speak clearly but incoherently enter left middle index finger turn head and cough reverse click on verify"

...which make no sense at all.

• From the flavour text, the abbreviations "LAN" and "WAN" stand for Local Area Network and Wide Area Network. These are two common forms of networking available today.

• This card is a reference to White Wolf's Vampire role-playing game and Wizards of the Coats's collectible card game Vampire: The Eternal Struggle.

• In the early existance of the Macintosh computer there was a game called Mac Playmate. It was an erotic game where you had to give some pleasure to a girl with a lot of toys (vibrators etc...). On the screen (not very far from the Toy box) there was a big button labelled "Panic Button". When you clicked on this button the screen changed to display a huge database of sales in the US (just in case the boss came into your office). This game was well known (even by non Mac users) just because of this Panic Button. The flavour text on the card reads:

"As a last resort, I'm trying something I learned from Marketing: bombard him with sexy options and chances are he'll choose something he doesn't need. "

which may go some way to strengthening this possible link.

• "Total quality management" (a systematic approach to business aimed at improving efficiency) according to Dening uses a system of Plan, Do, Check, Action. PDCA. This card may be a snide reference to this.

• The flavour text reads:

"Maybe you and I could-"
"Keep it simple, stupid."

The phrase "Keep it simple, stupid" is commonly used by computer programmers when developing new programs, and is often referred to as the KISS principle.

• This Agenda has the capability to become a supply of extra bits for the Corp, as befits the Project name, since Zurich is the world centre of banking.

• This card's flavour text reads: "Why is a raven like a write-protect?" This is an allusion to Lewis Carroll's classic children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In this book, the Mad Hatter asks Alice "Why is a raven like a writing desk?". Various mishaps and adventures prevent Alice (and the reader) from ever learning the answer.
• According to Martin Gardner, Carroll had no answer in mind which he first wrote this. However, Carroll did gave a solution himself, in an 1896 edition of "Alice": "Because it can produce very few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar [sic] put with the wrong end in front." Gardner has recently added another: "Because there is a 'b' in 'both'."
• The Riddler is one of the supervillains battled by the fictional superhero Batman.

• The flavour text reads: "Like a snow crash, only much grittier." Snow Crash is a cyberpunk novel by Neil Stephenson.
• A card called Sandstorm also exists in the Magic: The Gathering game.

• "Scaldan" is an anagram of "scandal", which is appropriate given the bad publicity nature of this virus.

• This Sysop's last name is the same as that of Netrunner card artist Kim Francisco.

• In Greek mythology, the epic Odyssey of Homer told the story of Odysseus' travels on his way home from the Trojan War. One of his many adventures was to encounter the Sirens, a group of witches who lured men to their dooms by attracting them to the rocky shores of their island with unresistable songs. Odysseus had his crew plug their ears with wax to avoid the temptation, but had himself lashed to the mast so he could hear the deadly song without killing himself.

• The Sphinx is a creature of Greek and Egyptian mythology, with the head of a human and body of a lion. Greek legend says that Oedipus was confronted by a sphinx who would not let him pass until he had answered the riddle: "What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?" The answer is man, who crawls on all fours as an infant (metaphorically in the morning), walks upright when mature, and uses a walking stick when old. This riddle is echoed in the card's flavour text:

What runs on four megs in the morning, two megs in the afternoon, and three megs in the evening?

• The card art shows Egyptian statuary. The most famous sphinx is the Great Sphinx statue at Giza, near the Great Pyramids of Giza, just outside Cairo, Egypt.

• A stereogram is a three-dimensional picture, designed to be viewed so that each eye sees a slightly different image, thus providing the illusion of depth.

• The flavour text reads:

'SFX'! It says, 'SFX'!

This is a reference to oft-heard stories that some images (often in scenes from Disney movies) contain semi-subliminal sexual references, including the word 'SEX'.

• The Arasaka Corporate logo is visible on the chest of the figure in the card artwork.

• "Syd Meyer" is an obvious modification of "Sid Meier", the computer games programmer who developed the classic game Civilisation. He also helped develop the Magic: the Gathering computer game.
• Wizards of the Coast game designer Glenn Elliott has revealed that Syd Meyer Superstores was originally designed to give the Corp the rez cost of the ice in bits, but this was found to be too powerful in playtesting.

• The artwork shows a motorcycle with the Greek letter 'pi' printed on the front. The bike is riding over a string of digits, the first three of which look like 3.14 - the first three digits in the decimal expansion of the mathematical constant pi. The next digit however, is clearly a 0, followed by what looks like 845 and more unidentifiable digits. This means the artwork shows 3.140845..., different to the true value of pi which is 3.14159265...

• "Toughonium" is a simple combination of the word "tough" and the common "-nium" ending of many chemical elements.

• Tumblers are the small moving parts in key-operated locks which mechanically ensure that only the appropriate keys can open the lock.
• The card title is also a possible pun on Adobe Acrobat, a file-encoding system used to represent graphical images.

• The card title is a reference to the classic early computer game Adventure. A frequent occurrence in this game was to be informed that "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike" or some derivation thereof, such as "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all different". The flavour text evokes the feeling of these early computer games with the "Do you want to go (n)orth or (s)outh?" sentence.

• Vienna is the base of locations for future Global police (especially Net Police) in several Cyberpunk authors' works. William Gibson based the "Turing Police" based there, and Bruce Sterling also had such an organisation, colloquially known as the "Vienna Heat". It might be that some Runner prone to making viruses in 2020 thought it amusing to create a virus named after the Vienna cops.
• In France the number 22 is very closely tied to the police. There are a lot of expressions on the cops using the #22: "22!" when you see a cop, "papa 22" (daddy 22) on the highway to call cops waiting with a radar... Sometimes 22 is used to refer to the IQ of the standard cop :)...

• A card called Walking Wall also exists in the Magic: The Gathering game.

• From pg. 151 of the Cyberpunk 2020 Guidebook:

"Note: Occasionally, very devious types take advantage...by planting very large files in a system memory with seductive labels like SECRET PLANS TO RULE THE EARTH. The file, of course, contains nothing but useless garbage, but a really gullible Netrunner will invariably dump everything else he has just to carry this treasure back."

• The flavour text reads:

'Form of a Dwarf!' 'Shape of a Pile Driver!' I'm sick of this Proteus crap. Gimme a good, old-fashioned hammer program any day.

This alludes to the cartoon superheroes, the Wonder Twins, who possess the ability to change form, and invoke their power to do so by vocalising their wishes in this way - for example, 'Shape of an eagle!' 'Form of an ice-ladder!'.

Proteus has the following definitions:

• A sea god, son of Oceanus and Tethys, noted for his ability to assume different forms and to prophesy.
• A person or thing that readily changes appearance, character, principles, etc.

Proteus was originally promoted as having "over 150" cards. The real number is 154 cards.