Cyberpunk Last Name Generator

Cyberpunk last names do a different job than cyberpunk handles. A handle like Glitch or Ronin is chosen; a surname is inherited, and it tells you where a character's family came from before the city swallowed them. That is why the genre's best surnames are ordinary ones from everywhere at once: Welles, Alvarez, Takemura, Okafor, Volkov, Nguyen, Haddad. Night City, the Sprawl and Chiba City are dense, migrant megacities, and a roster of Satos, Reyeses and Kowalskis sells that density far better than invented sci-fi words do.

A second layer is the corporate dynasty. Arasaka, Kusanagi and Tyrell are names that carry a company with them, and they tend to be old, proper and slightly formal. Use those sparingly, for executives, heirs and the occasional disgraced family. Hyphenated surnames such as Ortega-Kim or Mbeki-Stroud are a useful shorthand for characters a few generations into the city, where cultures have mixed and nobody remembers which side of the family was which.

The list below blends real surnames from East Asia, South Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Europe with sprawl hyphenates, hard-edged Anglo names for mercenaries and fixers, and a handful of invented futuristic surnames for settings that lean more science fiction than street.