The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077 – The New Yorker

Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen, an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that Star Wars came out. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking Star Wars rogue played by Billy Dee Williams. If I couldve had a cape, I would have had a cape, he told me, over video chat from his home in western Washington. He bought a copy of Traveller at a Bay Area hardware store shortly after it was released. You had this vast, sweeping empire with aliens in it and all this stuff, he recalled, and people had these spaceships, and they went all over the place and traded and fought.

There were aspects of the game that irked him. No lightsabres, for instance. Plus, once the game began, the rules made it nearly impossible for the players character to die. He tinkered with the rules and ended up writing his own game, Imperial Star, which he finished around 1980. By 1982, he had a degree in graphic design, and he was soon working as a typesetter in a print shop at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He produced a good-looking rule bookalthough the game, in his view, was a hobbyists effort, developed as a pastime for his friends, some of whom have been playing a campaign in the Imperial Star universe for more than three decades. He created another game, Mekton, which was inspired by his discovery of anime and involved giant fighting robots. His wife, Lisa, encouraged him to demo it at DunDraCon, a role-playing convention near San Francisco. By the second day, a few dozen people had gathered around his table, eager to have a go. A friend suggested he start a business. R.Talsorian Gamesnamed for the father of one Pondsmiths friends, whod invested in the company as a tax writeoffincorporated in 1985.

One rainy night around this time, Pondsmith was driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge when he looked out his window and saw what looked like a mythical city, he told me. The sight evoked the neon Los Angeles of Ridley Scotts Blade Runner, a movie hed seen not long before. Night City, Pondsmith thought this place should be called. That is also, as it happens, the name of the demimonde in William Gibsons novel Neuromancer, which had been published in 1984, though Pondsmith had not yet read it. Neuromancer is the story of a data thief who uses a body-machine interface to break through a corporations A.I. defense system. Its considered the quintessential cyberpunk novel, a genre that was just then entering its heyday. In 1986, the writer Bruce Sterling published Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology; in the preface, Sterling contends that, for the then-new generation of sci-fi writers, technology is visceral, utterly intimate. That same year, Walter Jon Williams published the novel Hardwired, set in a Balkanized post-United States, where the middle class has been decimated and megacorporations have unchecked power. Pondsmith and Williams became friends, and Pondsmith began formulating a game set in Night City that drew, in part, on Williamss ideas. He envisioned a fractured U.S. in the thrall of technology and beset by rampant inequality. Williams tested out the game as Pondsmith worked on it.

The result, Cyberpunk, came out in 1988. It consisted of three books of rules and story lines and a pair of dice, and was set in the far-off year of 2013. The game, Pondsmith told me, was mostly about having cool gear and strutting around in it. But the format allowed for all kinds of inventiveness. Williams recalled a campaign in which he enlisted the writer Pati Nagle to play as a double agent; another player seemed to fall for Nagles character and was, Williams told me, utterly heartbroken that shed betrayed him. It was touching and hilarious at the same time. Pondsmith kept thinking about the games world, and reading the novels that were beginning to form the Cyberpunk canon. He started writing a sequel, set a few years later, that focussed less on peacocking in snazzy getups than on the interlocking segments that make up a society. The world he had imagined was a much larger ecosystem than he had initially realized, he told me. It involved how corporations work, how they kept people down, how they interacted with the city, how they interacted with the citizens at what levels. He called the sequel Cyberpunk 2020. The real question, he had decided, was: Why did this world keep producing people who get metalled up and go to the street?

When Cyberpunk 2020 came out, in 1990, Marcin Iwiski and Micha Kiciski were kids in a newly democratic Poland. The country was in the midst of so-called shock therapy as its economy transitioned from state control to capitalism. (When I recently mentioned to Bruce Sterling that a Polish company was bringing out a cyberpunk video game, he said, Its great that people in Warsaw can actually get some kind of hook into the industry, adding that he had spent a lot of time in that part of Europe, and was glad to see them get a leg up on the old cultural production ladder.) Iwiski and Kiciski met in a high-school math class. Both loved computer games, but the only versions of those games readily available in Poland were pirated copies traded by fans at weekend markets in Warsaw. After a couple of years hawking games in the Warsaw markets, the duo started getting CDs imported legally from international distributors and selling them to small retail stores. They incorporated in 1994, calling their company CD Projekt.

Their first big investment involved a Dungeons & Dragons video game that came on five CDs and involved recruiting Polish actors to voice characters in the game. They sold eighteen thousand copies on the first daya huge success. They then created a studio, CD Projekt Red, and developed their own game, based on a Polish fantasy series called The Witcher, which Andrzej Sapkowski had begun writing in the mid-eighties. The series takes place on an unnamed continent that was originally inhabited by mythical creatures and has since been colonized by humans. The titular witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is a monster-hunting mercenary. Developing the game took four years and ate up all of their funds. For half a year, we were working twelve-hour days every day, all weekends, all the time, the games lead character artist has said. The Witcher came out in 2007 and has since sold more than two million copies. Its sequel was so successful that Polands Prime Minister gave a copy to Barack Obama when Obama made a visit to the country, in 2011. Obama later called the game a great example of Polands place in the new global economy.

In 2012, CD Projekt Red announced that one of its next big games would be an adaptation of Mike Pondsmiths Cyberpunk. A teaser for the game, called Cyberpunk 2077, was released in January, 2013. It showed what appeared to be an attractive young cyborg in a tight-fitting top repelling bullets fired by heavily armored police with her skin. The video ended with a promise: COMING: WHEN ITS READY. In the meantime, the company released the Witcher 3, in 2015. There were some early technical hiccups, but it was eventually hailed as one of the best video games ever made, and sold more than thirty million copies.

Three years later, CD Projekt Red premired a nearly hour-long demo of Cyberpunk 2077 for a handful of attendees at the video-game industrys biggest trade show, E3. Cyberpunk 2077 is an open world game, in which you can roam more or less freely and do things that arent related to the games principal mission. The game largely employs a first-person perspectiveone of the studios more ambitious decisions was to mostly do away with scenes in which a player simply watches action unfold without any control over it. The idea is that, at all times, the player can wander around and see a world operating as it should.

The protagonist is a mercenary named V, who has been hired to steal a biochip. The heist goes bad, and V has to stash it in her head. (V can be whatever gender a player chooses.) The chip contains the digital incarnation of a rock star named Johnny Silverhand, who, half a century before, participated in the central tragedy in Night City history, the bombing of the Arasaka Tower, the regional headquarters of a major corporation. (Pondsmith told me that he was already writing that bit of game lore twenty years ago when he looked up at a TV and saw the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. He put the story aside for a while.) V has to remove the chip from her head before Silverhands identity overwrites her own. Meanwhile, she learns about the insidious activities of the Arasaka corporation, including the development of an A.I. program called Soulkiller. V must decide whether or not to sabotage Arasaka, as Silverhand once tried to do.

At an event ahead of the next E3, CD Projekt premired a trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 that culminated with Silverhands arrival onscreen in the form of Keanu Reeves. It was a canny choice: Reeves is basically the Hollywood face of cyberpunk, thanks to his roles in Johnny Mnemonic and the Matrix movies. (Ive always wanted to participate in different genres and, now, technologies and versions of storytelling, Reeves told me, when I asked him about Cyberpunk 2077. He also noted that Marlon Brando had a digital version of himself created in the eighties.) When the trailer ended, Reeves appeared onstage amid a puff of smoke and revealed that the game would be ready in April, 2020. Let me tell you, he said to the crowd, the feeling of being there, of walking the streets of the future, is really going to be breathtaking.

By then, former employees of CD Projekt Red had already told the journalist Jason Schreier, then working at Kotaku, that the development of the game had been rocky. In order to meet production deadlines, the ex-employees said many developers at the company had to rely on crunchi.e., mandatory, or effectively mandatory, overtime, a widespread industry practice that is notorious for causing burnout. Iwiski assured Schreier that his company was going to forbid mandatory overtime. Then, in January, 2020, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was pushed back to September. In June, it was pushed to November. In early fall, Schreier, now writing for Bloomberg, reported that CD Projekt Red had ordered six-day workweeks for its developers. Starting today, the entire (development) studio is in overdrive, Adam Badowski, the studios director, wrote in an e-mail obtained by Schreier. I know this is in direct opposition to what weve said about crunch, he added. Its also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while backthat crunch should never be the answer. But weve extended all other possible means of navigating the situation. (In response to Schreiers article, Badowski posted a message on Twitter: This is one of the hardest decisions Ive had to make, but everyone is well compensated for every extra hour they put in.) A few weeks after that, the release was postponed again, to December.

In the months leading up to the new December launch date, I spoke and corresponded with a number of people at CD Projekt Red. In an e-mail, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, the quest director for Cyberpunk 2077, wrote, I believe were trying to show with our worldbuilding and narrative that in reality the issues that plague the Cyberpunk society, and by extension our own society, are much more complex and fundamentalas Johnny Silverhand learns the hard way, its not enough to topple one corporation to really make a difference, as others will take its place right away. One of the clichs that his team had tried to avoid, he went on, was a binary depiction of corporations as bad and cyberpunks as good. The corporations and their dysfunctions in this approach are a symptom of a systemic issue, not the cause, he explained. Iwiski told me that, for him, the worst kind of entertainment is obvious entertainment, and insisted that, in the Witcher games and in this one, there is no clear distinction between good and evil. Patrick Mills, at the time the games senior quest designer, said that one of his high-level goals for the games lore was that there would be no consensus reality. He had cordinated with Pondsmith to insure continuity between the video game and its pen-and-paper siblings. Still, he said, We know with this many people working on this, telling this many number of stories, that were going to have inconsistencies. So why not work with that?

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The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077 - The New Yorker