Concordo com a resposta de alg na ID e nas diferenças nos detalhes citados. Veja como começa o "Spectator Sport":
"Dr. Rufus Maddon was not generally considered to be an impatient man - or addicted to physical violence.
But when the tenth man he tried to stop on the street brushed by him with a mutter of annoyance Rufus Maddon grabbed the eleventh man, swung him around and held him with his shoulders against a crumbling wall.
He said, 'You will listen to me, sir! I am the first man to travel into the future and I will not stand --'"
O cartaz original menciona lixo em todos os lugares e edifícios em decomposição. Na história:
"Once again he continued his aimless walk down the streets of the familiar city. There was a general air of disrepair. Shops were boarded up. The pavement was broken and potholed. A few automobiles traveled on the broken streets. They, at least, appeared to be of a slightly advanced design but they were dented, dirty, and noisy."
O pôster também menciona interfaces neurais diretas para mundos virtuais:
"Permanent was so much better than the temp stuff you could get on the home sets. The nerve ends was what did it, of course."
Além disso, descreve estar "ligado":
"They rolled him over on his side, made the usual incision at the back of his neck, carefully slit the main motor nerves, leaving the senses, the heart and lungs intact. They checked the air conditioning and plugged him into the feeding schedule for that bank of Perms.
Next they swung the handrods and the footplates into position, gave him injections of local anesthetic, expertly flayed the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, painted the raw flesh with the sticky nerve graft and held his hands closed around the rods, his feet against the plates until they adhered in the proper position."
O cartaz menciona que o protagonista é julgado insano ao contar às pessoas no futuro sobre sua viagem no tempo. Isso não está diretamente relacionado, mas é referido:
"Cramer, deputy chief of LD, sauntered in and said, 'The guy was really off. He was yammering about being from the past and not to destroy his mind.'"
Além disso:
"'Blast it, Al,' Handriss said, 'why couldn't your people have been more careful! He looks as if he might have been intelligent.'
Al shrugged. 'Do they come here from the past every couple of minutes? He didn't look any different than any other lobey to me.'"
Finalmente, o cenário do Oeste Selvagem no final:
"Inside the cubicle, Dr. Rufus Maddon was riding slowly down the steep trail from the mesa to the cattle town on the plains. He was trail-weary an sun-blackened. There was an old score to settle. Feeney was about to foreclose on Mary Ann's spread and Buck Hoskie, Mary Ann's crooked foreman, had threatened to shoot on sight.
Rufus Maddon wiped the sweat from his forehead on the back of a lean hard brown hero's hand."
Como alg assinala, não está sendo atropelado por um ônibus que lança Maddon no futuro; ele viaja de propósito. Além disso, o VR não estava na forma de jogos interativos, mas mais como filmes. Por fim, as pessoas não eram prisioneiras, mas, na verdade, salvaram a vida inteira para a conexão "Perm"; foi uma coisa voluntária. O pôster pode estar se esquecendo ou misturando detalhes de outra história.