An Impractical Idea: Cyberpunk via Hard Drive

I was going through some old hard drives with an IDE/SATA to USB converter (thanks to Stew and others for advice on this) and the feel of it — seeing/hearing/feeling a chunk of weighty metal rev up thanks to the most trivial hardware hacking you could possibly do — gave me an idea:

• Distribute a retro cyberpunk RPG this way.
• You’d get an artist to gussy up the hard drive to look like some menacing bit of futuristic technology according to 80s design aesthetics. I’m thinking of early Walkmans with chunky, battered chrome, maybe with an LED readout — actually, especially with an LED readout. I’d probably keep some of the drive’s steel around just because hard drives look agelessly rugged and cool by themselves.
• The game would be written in a user-editable web format (maybe an offline WordPress installation and crosslinked wiki) with the option to print a version or see it in PDF.
• It would of course be graphically rich, with all kinds of art I can’t afford, but it would also include a bunch of tools such as a dice roller, a character creator and sheet, maps and so forth. Of course, if I’m indulging a fantasy maybe an engine for graphical netrunning that automatically implemented skills.
• The offline web format provides the means to port it online as well. Perhaps a hosted chat system should be thrown in there too. Ideally, you should be able to just move the whole thing to a server with minimal tweaking.
• Not many ideas systemwise. It would have a light setting, perhaps with an annex about how to “modernize” it for those who want cell phones, more than three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi, and posthuman pretensions, though I think gripes about the aging tech kind of miss the point.
• It would only be available via hard drive — maybe in cheap old 6GB drives (I was looking through my old Quantum 6GB drive from 1998 when the idea hit me, and looked them up – 5 bucks each on EBay for good ones, 99 cents for maybe-dodgy ones).
• The super crazy and impractical option would be to integrate the game into a dedicated operating system, such as a build of Chromium OS. You would “boot to RPG” when it’s time to play. Chromium is designed to primarily boot from SSD if I’m not mistaken, though, so it’s not my first choice. The *click* *whirr* of battered steel is just too cool.
• . . . and the craziest option of all would be to only ship the game in full computer form — probably an ASUS Keyboard PC because it has the cyberdeck form factor. It would need some case modding to make it look right. Yeah, not gonna happen. But if you’re dreaming, may as well dream big . . .
• There would be some kind of home site for each drive/game to talk to and share resources with.
• Of course, you’d make the game open source, though you’d sell the physical artifact for some outrageous price to cover the costs. In my fantasy I saw one option of using this format to release an official Cyberspace Trilogy RPG (it’s a fantasy, after all) with proceeds going to charity (because of course this would convince William Gibson’s representation to not charge me any money! — and because I am actually considering ideas for a permanent RPG for charity right now) via the inflated price of selling an RPG in an artisan-modified hard drive.

I could actually do 90% of this (not get the license, do the art or do some of the cooler UI mods) if I had a spare self lying around that wasn’t busy, or somebody to pay me a truckload of money to drop everything I’m doing. Maybe a wealthy patron can order it done or a network of nerds can work on it.

Of course, it’s more doable once you scale back expectations, but once you commit to the hard drive format I think you’d need to throw something pretty damned special under the hood.