Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk series actually started in 1988 with the first version of the TRRPG set in 2013. Arasaka was around then. Armatech-Luccessi International, which became Militech after rebranding, was a corpo in 2013, just in a different capacity at the time.

In 1990's Cyberpunk 2020, set in 2020, both corpos had been fully established as very powerful, separate entities.

So, Mike's seen this coming for a while. There are so many parallels from our current timeline and the fictional one in the game, it's scary...

Look into the history of the Chiquita banana company. We already been there a while now.

Oh boy, just what we need, corpo-wars to go along with the nation-wars.

It would be nice to see them hurting each other instead of the general populace, but we all know that they do collateral damage to innocents even when weapons aren't involved.