Cyberpunk

If I had to pick one, I'd probably say Ghost in the Shell Stand-Alone Complex. Everything GitS is great, of course, but that first season of SAC is my fav of all the iterations.

Other Great Stuff:

• Blade Runner's the OG, and I think the sequel's just as good. The anime series for it, Black Lotus, is more pulpy than cerebral but I enjoyed it as well.
• I don't know if it counts, but I'll mention Patlabor here. If you haven't seen it, go watch it. Use this watch order
• Dredd 2012 is great, but again more pulpy. Haven't read the comics but I plan to get the "essential" TPBs
• Again, I don't know for sure it counts, but Cowboy Bebop is what I would call a masterpiece. I think everyone should watch it before they die.
• More subdued is A Scanner Darkly. I really enjoyed that movie as a teenager, but I haven't seen it in the last 15 or so years so not sure how it holds up.
• Biggest mindfuck would be Serial Experiments Lain. I couldn't wrap my head around it when I first saw it around 13, then I rewatched in my 20s and think I got the gist. If you like weird stuff that you have to think about to understand, it's great.

For me it was Ghost in the Shell and Shadowrun, which was the first pen & paper RPG I played when I was in college. I always played a rigger because that was the first time that I ever thought about "hacking" something other than a computer or network as a lifestyle. Combining the cultures of "petrol heads" and "tech nerds" clicked with me.

But the first "cyberpunk" movie that made the idea of technology as a sub-culture real to me was, ironically, (and I hate to admit this) seeing "Hackers" for the first time. Certainly not as a real vision of what "cyberpunk" was, but rather an extremely over-the-top and glamorized commentary both on how non-technical people view technophiles as well as how people who ate, slept, lived, and breathed a tech-centered ethos might live. Like, my parents legit believed that's how I acted with my friends when I wasn't around them.

I grew up in the era of The Legion of Doom and the Cult of the Dead Cow, and realized that this hyperbolic version of the archetypical "console cowboys" was how a lot of people saw the younger generation of computer kids. They had graduated from the long-haired, bearded, ex-hippies toiling away in a basement somewhere into stylish (albeit very weird) tech-savvy young hacktivists that were trying to buck the system solely because someone told them they couldn't.

Then, reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash introduced the idea of a virtual world parallel (beneath? alongside?) to the physical world and that was the gravity that brought it all together.

I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the 'cyber' part then the 'punk' part.

Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of "what it means to be human", which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.

That's why, out of all visual media, it's really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It's the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That's probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?

This probably won't be a popular opinion, but Shadowrun is what introduced me to cyberpunk & I still love the setting.

I don't really know since when I started to like cyberpunk, but I was gifted a book in a somewhat child-friendly cyberpunk setting. It was called Back-Up (Unfortunately only available in german). I don't recall much of it, just that there was this hacker called "GoTo" uploaded his conciousness into a computer and was able to access the internet and stuff. His catchphrase was "bilbao" something like "everything will be fine". I guess that really stuck with me, since I remembered it after 20 years...

The other big influence of mine was of course manga and anime. Ghost in the Shell was my favourite movie for a long time. I also watched Serial Experiments Lain, but didn't really understand it. Just that it was cool as heck.

I think mine would have to be between Cyberpunk 2077 the game, the Edgerunners anime (honestly I take them both together as one) and Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex. Gods, SAC was so good.
Of course, all of the other works mentioned in the OP and in the thread are great too, but I think these are my favorites.

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was the first time i really engaged with cyberpunk media, and (I would realize a decade later) was what led me to question my own gender and sexual identity and honestly helped mold my outlook on life and politics so it will always have a special place in my heart.

The Original GitS movie is up there too, obviously Edgerunners, Psycho-Pass (Season 1 specifically), and while Mardock Scramble was (imo) a weaker entry in the genre, I really enjoyed the visual aesthetics of the film trilogy.

If video games count then MGS2, Va-11 Hall-A, Cyberpunk 2077, and Deus Ex: HR. A bit more that are (imo) weaker entries in the genre are Watch Dogs, Mirror's Edge, and Syndicate (2012) (Seriously nobody should play this game it was bad and the bloom was blinding, but I liked it because it was brainless fun and eye candy if you can get past the bloom)

My introduction to both cyberpunk and to Blade Runner was the Blade Runner PC game from 1997. First 1GB+ game I remember buying. I would walk out onto the balcony just to hear the Vangelis score...

I if I had to pic just one, Serial Experiments Lain would be one of the safe choices. Not only was it way ahead of it's time, going as far as to predict online movements like anonymous (knights, in the series), it has many themes that are relevant to this day.

One less known piece is Cloudpunk. This game made me legit fall on tears. It's about how little people carry on under a capitalist dystopia. Which is basically almost how things already are but with flying cars.

Ghost Rider 2099 is a definitive cyberpunk graphic novel for me. Len Kaminski's writing plus the graphic style were perfect.

Aside from the Blade Runners, I'd say Akira.

I like all I've read so far from other comments, Blade Runner taking the lead by far. However I'd like to add a somewhat iconic yet often forgotten item to the list: Appleseed, the original one.

Neuromancer, Deus Ex, and Shadowrun were my gateways into cyberpunk. This thread has been great - I have so much more to check out.

I feel like genre has only become more prescient and will continue to be.