CD Projekt Red showed off even more of Cyberpunk in a new Night City Wire livestream on Friday morning.
GamesRadar published an excellent breakdown of the event, highlighting a few interesting background details. These include an explicit Star Trek reference, the origin of Night City’s name, police mechs, and — my favorite — the spaceport.
Blade Runner’s considered one of the seminal texts of the cyberpunk genre. Inspired by the same serialized Moebius comic that informed William Gibson’s Neuromancer — “The Long Tomorrow,” written by Dan O’Bannon of Alien fame — Blade Runner takes place on Earth but references the “off-world colonies.”
In Blade Runner 2049, Jared Leto’s ghoulish villain wants to take Rick Deckard up into space, and “off-world” takes on a kind of paradise-lost vibe. These aren’t places you’d necessarily want to go, grimy as the film’s post-cyberpunk Earth seems, because they belong to the power elite.
Notably, Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk IP licensed by CD Projekt Red, wrote a sourcebook in 1993 called Deep Space: Take Cyberpunk to the Final Frontier. That storyline took place in an alternate 2025 — more than fifty years prior to the upcoming video game.
“The book follows on from what was established in [prior sourcebook] Near Orbit and brings the timeline up to the year 2025,” the Cyberpunk wiki explains.
“People in space has become more widespread with the emergence of the corporations in the upper atmosphere, all in search for knowledge and resources to get the upper hand.”
Will players ever see outer space in Cyberpunk 2077? That remains to be seen, but it could make for a pretty climactic moment.
If the game’s worst baddies live among the heavens — which isn’t entirely far-fetched — hitching a ride up there and bringing their kingdom crashing down sounds pretty punk to me.