Good Morning Night City

HOW CYBERPUNK 2077 STOLE OUR HEARTS, AND CYBERNETICALLY REPLACED THEM WITH ONES MADE OF STEEL, CHROME AND NEON

- Adam Bryant

We’ve waited so long for this moment. When CD Projekt Red announced back in 2012 that it was working on a Cyberpunk game based on Mike Pondsmith’s popular pen and paper role-playing game, and that it was working in collaboration with the man himself, our imaginations ran wild just thinking about how this game would look when brought to life. After all, for years the world of Cyberpunk had only lived inside our heads. That was until early the following year when we got our first glimpse with a short pre-rendered teaser trailer. And what a tease it was.

There were a few nods to the Cyberpunk universe, with Dynalar Technologies, the Kiroshi corporation, Militech and Max Tac agents, but that was it. It ended with the agonising words “Coming: when it’s ready” letting us know that they’d be working on the game for quite some time before we’d see more. Fast forward five years to Microsoft’s 2018 E3 conference and we get another pre-rendered trailer. This time going into much more depth than before, with a sweeping shot of Night City, its people going about their lives, one of the vehicles you’ll be able to drive and even a version of the main character. But we wanted more. Luckily for us, we received an invite to get an exclusive look at the game.

We must admit, as we made our way to the CD Projekt Red presentation booth at E3 and into the cyberpunk themed bar that they’d set up especially for the event, with its neon lights and huge backlit poster of Night City stretched across the wall, we were a little nervous. Then came the moment where we were ushered into the dark room to await the presentation. All that nervousness soon evaporated to be replaced with pure excitement. After waiting six years, you would think we were prepared… but what we saw during the hands-off demo that consisted of 50 minutes of uninterrupted gameplay blew us away.