The event date given in the opening cinematic (January 31) is the birth-date of the producer/designer Tony Van.
After handing over licensing rights to the company Data East for the Super Nintendo version of the game; the game's creators (Jordan Weisman, Bob Charrette and Paul Hume) were dismayed at the removal of the combat system and the lack of proper tone (dark and foreboding) and approached Blue Sky Software, then an arm of Sega of America, about an "SSI-like CRPG on a console". The game took almost nine months to complete with a team of 16 and was so heavy on the back-end math during combat, "RAM flipping" was used to augment the Genesis' limited memory capabilities; it is for this same reason that only three classes were selectable (Gator Shaman, Decker and Street Samurai with mages unplayable). The game, now, is more famously known as being the inspiration for Greg Muzyka to leave the field of medicine after graduation and start BioWare.
On "Extraction" missions, in which you must help a person escape from a company they no longer wish to work for, sometimes the name of the person you must extract is Alan Turing. Turing was a legendary real-world pioneer in the field of computer science around the time of World War II. In more recent times, he was notably fictionalized in Neal Stephenson's novel 'Cryptonomicon'.