Every Version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The Blade Runner Final Cut (2007) is the version Ridley Scott actually wanted to make, without studio interference and without the voice-over that was grafted on. It is one of the most precisely controlled visual environments in cinema: every frame built with a density that rewards close watching. It is not a faithful adaptation of Dick's novel. It is something that stands on its own and justifies every departure. If you have only seen the theatrical cut, the Final Cut is a different film.

The Blade Runner game from Westwood Studios in 1997 is not a port of the film. It tells a parallel story with a different protagonist, set across the same streets and time period. The game randomizes which characters are replicants on each playthrough, which means two people who played it in 1997 may have had fundamentally different experiences and neither one is wrong. That is a design idea still ahead of its time. It also holds up visually in a way that most pre-millennium 3D does not.

Readers who come to the novel after the film often find it stranger and funnier than expected. The mood organ, the Mercerism religion, the empathy box, the all-day TV host Buster Friendly: Dick packed ideas into this book that the films sensibly left out because they would each require their own film to explain. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is not a rough draft of Blade Runner. It is its own odd, anxious thing, and the ending hits differently when you know the film.