Robin Williams was a fan of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, according to its creator
As well as Warhammer.
Robin Williams, the beloved comedian and actor, was a fan of the Cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game according to its creator, Mike Pondsmith.
In an interview with Dicebreaker, Pondsmith – the designer of the original Cyberpunk tabletop RPG and co-founder of R Talsorian Games, the studio behind the TRPG series – described hearing from a mutual friend that Robin Williams, the late actor and comedian best known for his roles in Aladdin and Good Will Hunting, was a fan of sci-fi roleplaying game. The Oscar winning actor would frequent a tabletop gaming store in which Pondsmith’s friend worked and ran a campaign of Cyberpunk 2020 that included Williams as a player.
“I had a friend that worked in a games store and was running a Cyberpunk game that Robin was in,” said Pondsmith. “I said ‘I would kill to see that game.’”
Later on, Pondsmith recalled someone on his team getting a call from one of William’s assistants during the time in which the actor was filming Good Will Hunting. According to the R Talsorian team member, William was asking after a particular Cyberpunk sourcebook for a game he was intending to run. Pondsmith recounted: “He [the R Talsorian team member] says ‘Robin wants to know if he can get a copy of Night City because he’s left his at home and he’s running a game’, and we went ‘Yeah, send him everything’”.
Pondsmith continued that his mutual friend working at the tabletop gaming store would frequently see Williams playing Cyberpunk there, with the RPG creator having lamented that he never managed to cross paths with the actor despite also frequenting the same store: “the weird part is we used to go to the same game store and we always missed each other […] my friend would tell Robin ‘Mike was in here, you just missed him’.”
Besides Cyberpunk, Pondsmith confirmed that Williams was also a fan of the Warhammer miniatures series. “I had a friend who was painting Robin Williams’ Warhammer army,” said Pondsmith.
Cyberpunk is a tabletop roleplaying game series that began in 1988. The first release – simply titled Cyberpunk – introduces players and games masters to an alternative version of 2013 in which corporations have become powerful enough to rule entire nations and start wars on a massive scale. The second edition of the game, Cyberpunk: 2020, moved the series timeline several years ahead and introduced new gameplay mechanics, as well as various canonical events. The most recent edition of the RPG, Cyberpunk Red, takes place in an alternative 2045 and is set to lead up to the events of the 2020 video game adaptation, Cyberpunk 2077, which was developed and published by CD Projekt Red.
Besides the Cyberpunk series, R Talsorian Games is known for publishing the tabletop RPG adaptation of the Witcher video game series, which was also developed and published by CD Projekt Red.