During a recent trip to Atlanta, I stopped by the Coca-Cola Museum. There, you pay $6 to get a propaganda overdose from the Coke home office. Seeing the 111-year history of Coke laid out before me got me to thinking about the nature of huge corporations, and that of course led me to pondering the cyberpunk genre. Well, it's a natural chain of thought for a gamer, anyway

Why are cyberpunk games over run with private security firms and weapons manufacturers? Sure, they're tough, and cool, but honestly -- how warped does the world have to get before a private security company gets big enough to become a player in international politics? It seems that the most powerful corporations would be the ones that make a product that everyone uses.

Take Coke, for example... the corporation has served over 5.2 trillion drinks since it was founded. There's almost no place on earth that you can't buy a Coca-Cola product, and the Coke symbol itself is the most widely-recognized corporate logo on Earth. In America alone, 82 million Coke products are consumed every day. Imagine what it will be like in 2020.

In short, Coca-Cola is huge. Enormous. Couple that size with the cyberpunk genre's dark slant, and you might have something fearsome indeed. Not scared, you say? They make soft drinks, not heavy weapons, so what do you have to fear from them?

Plenty, pal. Not all wars are fought with firearms. An enterprising cyberpunk GM could create a very suspenseful campaign with an "innocent" firm such as Coca-Cola at the center of it.

Imagine the possibilities of a mundane, yet enormous company trying to influence elections, exploit new markets, fix prices, put mind control substances in its products... the list go on and on. The trick to making this style game work is not letting the players stay complacent. If they're used to dealing with Arasaka with guns blazing, they'll have to quickly lea new techniques to deal with the subtle machinations of a beverage-bottling zaibatsu. The corporate front will be squeaky clean. PCs investigating allegations of wrongdoing will be give tours of bottling plants and labs to prove nothing untoward is happening. Smiling executives will bend over backwards to demonstrate that everything is kosher, expressing concern that anyone would propagate such terrible rumors.

Violence, when required, will take the form of unfortunate "accidents" rather than a hail of gunfire from a passing sedan, If an elimination is needed, daring executives may even plan a tragic accident during a tour of one of the company facilities.

Rather than being hated and feared Coke and similar corporations are often thought of warmly by the population -- you should have seen the number of people buying $80 Coke sweatshirts in their museum gift shop A good GM can use this trust to really stick it to the players. Who's going to believe them when they claimi that Coca-Cola is stockpiling mind-altering chemicals at a facility in Brazil? No one -- they're all too busy worrying about Arasaka, after all.

If you are finding that your cyberpunk games are getting a littlle stale, try dropping your gun-toting chrome-limbed players into an international conspiracy with a mundane beverage company at the middle it all. Sometimes changing gears is just what a game needs to get back on track.