Wake up, samurai! Five years have passed. In that time, Cyberpunk 2077 has gone from a resounding failure to cult classic status. Cyberpunk as a genre is generally considered a legacy of the 1980s, and its “father” is William Gibson. However, it took much longer to develop, gradually integrating its future tropes from science fiction, urban dystopias, punk culture, and technological fears. Gibson once distilled these elements into a coherent literary form, and decades later, CD Projekt Red did the same in an interactive format. In this article, we explore how Gibson and CDPR didn’t invent cyberpunk, but rather helped it become great.
The Cyberpunk We Never Lost
Cyberpunk is often presented as a genre that began with Neuromancer and William Gibson’s early stories—the works that formed the universe of the Cyberspace trilogy and the Anthill series. With this mythological beginning, the genre supposedly ended, dissolving into endless imitations of its aesthetic. However, a closer look reveals that the genre did not emerge suddenly, but rather developed gradually—through sixties science fiction, urban dystopias, fears of technology, punk, and counterculture.
The same can be said for the gaming industry: cyberpunk didn’t begin in 2020. Long before Cyberpunk 2077, dozens of studios experimented with its elements—from Hideo Kojima’s Snatcher to System Shock and Ghostrunner. They all toyed with the genre’s tropes, like writers before Gibson, exploring future megacities, body modification, corporate cults, personality breakdown, and identity crises, but always only fragmentarily. Like science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s, these games explored isolated motifs, synthesizing them with other genres, but never quite creating a cohesive image.
The Deus Ex series came closest to becoming the Neuromancer of gaming. It was the first to gather the key elements of cyberpunk into a unified system, creating a tangible world that can be not only seen but also felt. But it was CD Projekt Red that took the next step—they created cyberpunk that can be experienced.
Today, five years after the release of Cyberpunk 2077, it’s important to talk not about what CDPR “borrowed” from William Gibson or Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the tabletop Cyberpunk series, but about what they inherited. After all, like Gibson in literature, the developers weren’t the inventors of the genre in games. They found themselves at the right point on the cultural map and accomplished the same task: collecting and crystallizing the scattered elements of cyberpunk into a coherent form that defined how we see this world for years to come.
If we think of cyberpunk as an evolutionary chain of tropes—the city, the corporation, the body, the network, the lone hero, and artificial intelligence—it becomes clear that each of them has followed a similar path: originating in early science fiction, crystallized by Gibson, systematized by Pondsmith, and finally embodied in Cyberpunk 2077.
This article explores how this compilation came about and why CD Projekt Red, following in Gibson’s footsteps, created the most compelling game version of cyberpunk.
The city as a predatory living organism
“Good morning, Night City!” is a phrase familiar to anyone who has ever played Cyberpunk 2077. The cheerful greeting is invariably followed by a report of corpses, shootouts, and corporate squabbles, delivered in the same tone as a weather forecast. For Night City, this is its climate. It’s not just a backdrop, but a living organism with its own metabolism, respiration, and insatiable appetite. The city recycles its inhabitants, turning their fears, dreams, and bodies into fuel for its own ecosystem—the media, the economy, and the criminal underworld.
Night City grew out of the utopia of entrepreneur Richard Knight, who envisioned an ideal corporate metropolis free of bureaucracy and crime. After his assassination, the project fell under corporate control and became its own antithesis—a laboratory of inequality, total control, and eternal strife. Even the name given to the city in honor of its creator sounds like a mockery—it is a city drowned in darkness, where the night never ends.
But long before CD Projekt Red brought this predatory metropolis to life, the very idea of the city as a living and aggressive organism already existed in the science fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, urbanism was increasingly perceived not as a sign of progress, but as a symptom of degradation.
John Brunner was one of the first to express this idea artistically. In his novels “Stand on Zanzibar” and “Riding the Wave of Shock,” the city ceases to be a utopia and transforms into a system beyond human control. Its megacities are overcrowded, ecologically unstable, and overloaded with information. Brunner creates texts in a fragmented, almost collage-like style: the narrative is interrupted by advertisements, news, instructions, and reports, forming a continuous media noise. Thus, the city itself begins to “speak”—not through the actions of the characters, but through the flow of data that shapes the soundscape and madness of a technological civilization.
This line was picked up and developed by William Gibson. His Sproul—or, in some translations, Anthill—represents a continuous chain of urban ecosystems stretching along the East Coast of the United States. This is no longer architecture, but a socio-informational environment in which humans are dissolved in streams of data, as if in the circulatory system of a metropolis.
Gibson calls Night City “an experiment in social Darwinism ,” where if you “stop being so fast,” you’ll be washed away. But if you overdo it, you can upset the “fragile balance.” As a result, all that’s left of a person is “a vague memory among the old-timers” and organs suitable for transplantation to “some rich asshole.” This is how Gibson formulates the principle by which all cyberpunk cities, including Night City, will subsequently exist: they exist in a state of fluid equilibrium between order and chaos. Here, technology requires lawless zones, and the metropolis itself becomes “an intentionally unfettered production site.”
Mike Pondsmith, creating the tabletop role-playing game Cyberpunk, transferred these ideas into a structured model. His Night City is described as a functioning system with an internal logic: economic centers, industrial zones, and neighborhoods of varying social status form an interdependent network. In the game environment, the city ceases to be simply a setting and becomes a tool for simulating society.
In Cyberpunk 2077, Night City becomes the definitive embodiment of the cyberpunk metropolis, where social, economic, and technological structures have merged into a single system. It’s not just a city, but a model of corporate feudalism, sustained by the display of technological progress while simultaneously eroding humanistic values. Architecture, economics, and social hierarchy are subordinated to a single ideological code: to demonstrate that power belongs to those who control the infrastructure.
The city is built on a vertical hierarchy, where spatial location is directly linked to social status. At the top are the corporate towers of City Center and the luxurious neighborhoods of Westbrook, symbols of capital and technological control. Below are the districts where the most degraded social strata are concentrated: Heywood, Watson, Pacifica, and, of course, Dogtown—a fairground of moral, technological, and physiological decay. These are the territories of marginalized groups, criminal networks, and the underground economy, a kind of “lower layer” of the metropolis, where everything deemed unnecessary or dangerous flows from the upper echelons.
Night City’s horizontal expansion reveals another facet of its nature. The city literally devours the environment from which it emerged, transforming the Wasteland into a visual embodiment of its own entropy. Even crime and gangs are integrated into the economy—not an aberration, but a mechanism for the informal redistribution of resources. Ultimately, Night City becomes a metaphor for modern urbanism, where technological excess coexists with social deficit. It is the ultimate form of the capitalist metropolis, where corporate power has replaced state institutions, and progress has ceased to signify development and has become a tool for maintaining inequality.
This controlled chaos reflects the city’s evolution as a cyberpunk trope. Night City occupies a place, if not the main character, then one of the key characters in the story. It never sleeps, watching and consuming those who are unwary. You can try to survive, fit in, keep up with the endless flow, but stumble, and the city will grind you down. This intonation is familiar to anyone who has ever tried to start from scratch in a “big city.” But the metropolis will outlive and chew up everyone—the weakest first. And if the city is a living organism, then corporations inevitably play the role of the brain that controls this body.
Corporate feudalism
The foundations of corporate power in cyberpunk began to be laid in the second half of the 20th century, when the Japanese model of corporate capitalism became a symbol of global economic growth. Zaibatsu and later keiretsu were vertically integrated conglomerates that combined industry, finance, and political influence.
Their strict hierarchy, ritualized culture, and cult of technological rationality defined a vision of the future that would later become one of the pillars of cyberpunk aesthetics. Neon, vertical architecture, discipline, and technocratic pathos emerged not from the fantasies of writers, but from real economic practices. This is why Japanese symbolism is so deeply woven into the genre’s DNA—from the megalopolises of Blade Runner to Cyberpunk 2077, where Arasaka embodies an Eastern style of power based on control, continuity, and unconditional loyalty to the corporation.
These ideas had been developed artistically long before CD Projekt Red. John Brunner was one of the first to describe a corporation as a political organism. In “Stand on Zanzibar,” a transnational company effectively rules the country, replacing state institutions, and in “Sheep Look Up,” a corporate-sponsored government drives society to the brink of environmental and social collapse.
In Brunner’s work, the corporation is a supranational entity, existing outside of law and morality, operating by the logic of efficiency rather than responsibility. Gibson merely perfected this image: in his worlds, corporations become analogous to new feudal houses—clans with their own armies, territories, and infrastructure. Thus, the genre acquires a clear model of power, where traditional institutions give way to structures that govern the world through technology and capital.
Against this backdrop, Mike Pondsmith began creating the Cyberpunk tabletop game, and it’s important to clarify: although he claims to have met Gibson after working on the first version of the world, the similarities between their visions are too numerous to be considered coincidental. In the mid-1980s, they were all working within the same cultural framework. It’s no coincidence that Night City, in its infancy, first appears in Gibson’s work as part of Sproul.
However, Pondsmith was influenced far more by Walter John Williams’ novel Exposed Nerve than by Neuromancer. It was from there that the logic of corporate military conflicts, the rigid class stratification, and the prototypes of future nomadic clans and street communities emerged. Influenced by these ideas, the concept of “Corporate Wars” emerged in the lore of the Cyberpunk tabletop game: states are reduced to observers, while Arasaka and Militech are transformed into ideological poles—an Eastern zaibatsu versus Western militaristic capital.
From this cultural, economic, and genre matrix emerges the world of Cyberpunk 2077. In its setting, corporations become a new form of power, controlling everything—the economy, technology, politics, and human life. They take the place of state institutions, integrating production, security, medicine, and private forms of justice into a single system. Corporate feudalism, envisioned by Brunner, formalized by Gibson, and structured by Pondsmith, becomes the foundation of Night City’s structure. Here, power belongs not to those who hold office, but to those who control the infrastructure, data, and tools of technological control.
Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 functions as a seamless corporate ecosystem. The police are contracted, medicine is commercialized through the “Trauma Team,” and the government is reduced to a symbolic role. Even the formal status of a “free city” changes nothing: all key institutions are embedded in the infrastructure of corporate interests. The storyline featuring Jefferson Perales demonstrates the limits of this dependence—interference in the minds of politicians becomes a routine control procedure, blurring the lines between power, technology, and manipulation.
Night City’s law enforcement system merely replicates this hierarchy. The NCPD operates as a quasi-governmental structure, with responsibilities distributed based on corporate contracts. Corruption is not an aberration here, but a built-in regulatory mechanism. Commissioner Jerry Folter combines an administrative position with commercial deals, effectively trading off police resources. The department’s structure is subordinated to the logic of private enterprise: staff reductions, cost optimization, and the transfer of authority to corporate security units.
Even special forces like the Max-Tac unit exemplify this shift from state to corporate violence. Originally created to combat cyberpsychosis, it has evolved over time into an autonomous force, embodying systemic violence beyond public control.
Within the police force itself, the full spectrum of institutional erosion is revealed. Detective River Ward embodies the remnants of an idealistic notion of serving the law, but any attempts he makes to act conscientiously are dashed by a system where corruption is ingrained into basic protocol. At the opposite extreme is Folter, who has transformed the NCPD into a machine for blackmail and influence peddling.
Between them lies a whole spectrum of moral compromises: the cynical pragmatism of Sergeant McCarlson, who uses mercenaries to solve his personal problems, and the despair of Officer Barry Lewis, broken by the pointlessness of service in a world where corporations and gangs easily buy immunity. This cast of characters creates an internal sociology of the department, showing how the corporatocracy engulfs those who are supposed to restrain it.
This is how the key feature of corporate power manifests itself in Cyberpunk 2077. It doesn’t destroy competitors—it recycles them, subjugating institutions and turning them into service mechanisms. Police, medicine, politics, and justice form a closed loop that maintains capital’s stability through technological dominance and self-perpetuating violence. As a result, CD Projekt Red’s game becomes not only the heir to the ideas of Gibson, Williams, and Pondsmith, but also their most vivid embodiment in interactive form—a model of a world where corporate power is not a decoration but a central mechanic, determining everything from the economy to human psychology.
Modifications, loss of humanity and the body as a territory of control
Beyond Brunner’s ideas, the development of cyberpunk was influenced by the so-called New Wave of science fiction, which shifted its focus from technological advances to an exploration of the psyche, identity, and the human body under the pressure of the technological environment. Philip K. Dick, in his 1960s novels (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch”), already questioned the boundaries between the human and the artificial. His characters exist in a world where bodies and consciousness can be replicated, and the sense of reality can be counterfeited. In Dick, the flesh ceases to be a guarantee of authenticity and becomes another form of simulation, controlled by external forces—corporations, technology, chemicals.
Kevin Wayne Jeter’s Dr. Adder (written in 1972, published in 1984) took this motif to its physiological extreme. While Dick’s alienation of the body is metaphysical, Jeter’s is social and material. His post-apocalyptic Los Angeles is transformed into Rattown, where surgeon Adder satisfies the sadistic and sexual fantasies of his clients, repurposing bodies as commodities. Flesh ultimately becomes an object of exploitation and an instrument of power—it is bought, repurposed, and mutilated according to the desires of others. Jeter thus establishes an aesthetic line that would later become one of the foundations of cyberpunk—technofetishism, the symbiosis of pain and modification, the blurring of the lines between enhancement and violence.
William Gibson developed these ideas in parallel. For him, the body becomes an interface between man and machine, a tool for network access and a marker of social hierarchy. Heroes are equipped with implants, sensory enhancers, and neural accelerators, but each upgrade comes at a price—the loss of some autonomy. Gibson reinforces the genre’s central anthropological motif: humans lose control over their own bodies because technology and capital transform them into an extension of infrastructure. However, for Gibson, the body remains primarily a metaphor for dependency—a unit of connection to the system, rather than a literal economic category.
Mike Pondsmith, creating the tabletop Cyberpunk series, gave these philosophical ideas a structural form. He translated the cybernetic enhancement of the body into game mechanics, where each modification has a measurable cost. The humanness index and the phenomenon of cyberpsychosis transform dehumanization from a metaphor into a gameplay principle. The more a character enhances themselves with implants, the more they lose empathy and control over their psyche. Thus, Dick and Gibson’s philosophical dilemma receives a systemic expression: in a future world, power leads to the disintegration of personality.
This logic reaches its culmination in Cyberpunk 2077, where the body becomes the center of the narrative and the very structure of the world. CD Projekt Red visualizes what literature only anticipated: human flesh becomes a resource, and individuality a byproduct of technological and economic evolution. Implants become not only a means of survival but also a marker of social status. The more advanced the modifications, the greater the chance of survival in a society where vulnerability equals poverty. Thus, a new form of inequality is born: corporations with access to premium equipment are pitted against street dwellers forced to use cheap and dangerous prosthetics. Economics literally permeates biology—the body becomes an element of infrastructure.
From the very first minutes of the game, V finds himself part of this system. Optical implants, neural interfaces, prosthetics—all are installed by ripperdocs, underground cybersurgeons like Victor Vector. Their offices resemble a hybrid of a clinic and a car repair shop, where people are disassembled and reassembled. Medicine loses its humanistic nature and becomes a service integrated into the city’s economy. Against this backdrop, cyberpsychosis becomes a metaphor for systemic collapse. A series of side missions depict people driven mad by an overabundance of implants. Madness here is not a pathology, but a natural reaction of a society where technology invades the psyche faster than it can adapt.
The streets of Night City are rife with “Scavenger” gangs, kidnapping people to extract their implants. Mountains of bodies—the “waste” of post-industrial production—stack the landfills. The Trauma Team medical service turns the very concept of rescue into a privilege: assistance is provided only to clients with paid insurance. Even death is commercialized here—after death, the body becomes a commodity for the secondary market.
The culmination of the body theme is the Arasaki biochip from the “Save Your Soul” project. The device allows a digital engram to be transferred to a new host, effectively transferring the personality at the cost of the original’s death. A malfunction in V’s case creates a unique situation: the hero’s active brain conflicts with Johnny Silverhand’s engram, and the body becomes an arena for a struggle between two consciousnesses within a single neural system. Here, the cyberpunk idea reaches its ultimate limit—the body becomes not just a commodity or an interface, but a space for conflict between the human and the system, the digital and the living.
It’s safe to assume that this line was inspired not only by Gibson and his Johnny Mnemonic, but also by Walter John Williams and his novel Exposed Nerve, which features a similar project called “Black Mind.” However, determining who borrowed what from whom is nearly impossible in cyberpunk. All the key authors worked within the same cultural framework: themes of digital immortality, identity duplication, and the disconnect between body and mind were all prevalent in the 1980s. It was as if the genre was simultaneously searching for words for the same fear—the loss of self in the face of technology.
Putting this aside, we ultimately arrive at the genre’s central question: if your body no longer belongs to you, what remains of your identity? The answer lies in the figure of the cyberpunk hero—the last bearer of autonomy in a world where everything, including your flesh, can be requisitioned by the system. The cyberpunk hero lives in the space between their own choices and the structure that limits them. They don’t seek to defeat the system—they strive to remain themselves, even as the space for this is rapidly shrinking.
Cyberpunks
If the theme of the body in cyberpunk reflects the degree of human subordination to the system, the theme of the subject describes the opposite movement—an attempt to regain autonomy. Here, the second half of the genre’s dualism comes into play: punk as a cultural and ethical strategy of resistance to technological and corporate control.
The emergence of the term “cyberpunk” in the early 1980s reflected a shift in cultural optics. Gardner Dozois, who coined the term in 1983, described artists who combined high technology with street culture. He coined the phrase “High tech, low life,” which became the quintessential expression of the genre. But who are the cyberpunks as heroes?
Instead of engineers and space explorers, hackers, mercenaries, and smugglers came to the forefront—subjects of the technogenic world, formed on its social periphery. Science fiction, having absorbed the aesthetics of punk culture, abandoned utopianism and focused on man, displaced from the center of history. The cyberpunk hero lives not in the future, but in the present, reduced to technological absurdity. He doesn’t build new worlds—he survives in the ruins of the old.
The antihero and counterculture figure—direct heirs to the punk spirit of the late 1970s—became central figures in this worldview. The punk movement itself arose as a response to social crisis and the loss of faith in grand ideals. It was a rebellion without a program, a protest without a utopia: the energy of the streets, nonconformism, and the aesthetics of amateurism became a way of existing outside the system. These traits permeated the artistic fabric of cyberpunk. Its hero inherited not so much an external appearance as an internal attitude—a distrust of authority and a belief in the individual gesture as the ultimate form of freedom.
It was William Gibson who created the definitive image of the cyberpunk hero. His Case and Molly are not inhabitants of an abstract future, but people of the present, pushed to the technological limit. Their world is a high-tech space, where freedom is reduced to individual decisions, and every choice becomes a compromise between dependence and risk. Case is a dystopian inversion of the cowboy: his frontier is cyberspace, and his rebellion is directed not against the law, but against the determinism of a system that turns people into resources. Gibson enshrines the key principle of the genre: the cyberpunk hero doesn’t save the world, he fights for his own self, knowing that the system is stronger.
Mike Pondsmith gave this model a structural form. In the tabletop Cyberpunk game, many classes—the Rocker, the Nomad, the Netrunner, and others—express various forms of social protest, but also capture ways of surviving in late capitalism. These are punk archetypes translated into game roles. Here, it’s impossible to destroy the system, but you can resist it in a vibrant, distinctly individual way.
Cyberpunk 2077 builds on this tradition by telling the story not of a chosen savior, but of an ordinary antihero caught up in a greater game. V is a figure without privilege or status, a man whose freedom is constrained by circumstances from the very beginning. Regardless of his chosen origins—nomad, street child, or corporate—he quickly finds himself at the bottom of the social hierarchy. His goal isn’t to change the world, but to regain his body and some control over his life. It’s easy to see him as a direct descendant of Case—a broken specialist hired for a cause he can’t fully understand. Both are driven by desperation and exist within a system pre-set against them.
Nevertheless, the game retains an element of resistance in this defeat. V is capable of a gesture—albeit doomed, but fundamental. This is the punk instinct of cyberpunk: an act of individual will that doesn’t abolish structure but captures the human within it. This gesture becomes a sign of negation transformed into a way of existence. The same spirit is embodied in the figure of Johnny Silverhand—a digitized legend of the rock scene, a symbol of protest. Silverhand is not just an ally or an antagonist, but the voice of the genre’s ideological core, a charismatic phantom of punk culture.
CD Projekt Red masterfully developed the conflict between the individual and the system, between the body and code, between reality and simulation. Silverhand’s legendary attack on Arasaka Tower becomes a metaphor for rebellion—doomed but necessary. This echoes the finale of Neuromancer, where Case’s team storms the Tessier-Ashpulls’ lair. In both cases, the heroes make a suicidal breakthrough against the machinery of power, asserting the human right to at least one final choice—a choice that will leave a mark on history, even if it doesn’t change the system. Because punk lives as long as the memory of resistance endures.
Cyberpunk 2077 places particular emphasis on the humanistic dimension, which has long been marginalized within the genre. CD Projekt Red demonstrates that even in the face of total technological alienation, humans are capable of maintaining empathy, solidarity, and inner integrity. Through key subplots, the game builds a panorama of human relationships, expanding the boundaries of cyberpunk’s narrative.
Jackie Wells becomes the voice of the street—a bearer of fundamental ethical principles that the system cannot destroy. His simple, almost naive faith in humanity resonates in Night City as a rare counterpoint to the cynicism of the surrounding world. Panam Palmer embodies a different vector of resistance—loyalty, independence, and freedom of movement. Her story brings back to the genre the idea of the road as a symbol of choice and community, a reminder that the connection between people can be stronger than any network.
Judy Alvarez sets the internal scale of the protest. Her struggle for freedom of mind, body, and voice for those the system has turned into objects becomes one of the game’s emotional pillars. And Goro Takemura embodies the tragedy of the corporate subject—a man whose life was built on loyalty and discipline, but who is forced to relearn the distinction between duty and humanity. His journey demonstrates that even an individual deeply embedded in the system can retain the capacity for moral choice.
Through these individual stories, Cyberpunk 2077 articulates a new cyberpunk ethic. Here, protest against structure is combined with the affirmation of humanity. Resistance takes on not only a political or physical dimension, but also an existential one. A genre that traditionally depicted the loss of humanity now has the opportunity to speak about its preservation—albeit within the limits imposed by the system.
The game’s greatest strength is that CD Projekt Red imbues the cold cyberpunk world with human content. Alongside neon and blood, there’s friendship, tenderness, the pain of loss, and a willingness to support others. The game doesn’t abolish the genre’s cynicism, but rather reinterprets it: a person remains human not because they possess a body, but because they are capable of feeling, choosing, and remembering.
These lines create a new perspective on the genre. Even in a world where the body has been transformed into technology and memory into a commodity, Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrates that space for the human gesture still exists. This isn’t a promise of victory, but an opportunity for resistance. But it’s precisely this that transforms cyberpunk from a chronicle of alienation into a story about how difficult, yet still possible, it is to remain alive when the entire world convinces you otherwise. Perhaps such rays of hope have always existed on the dark streets of any Night City—it’s just that no one has ever shown them so vividly before. And CD Projekt Red certainly deserves credit for this.
Cyberspace and Digital Immortality
The path taken outlines the terrestrial cycle of cyberpunk: from the city as a structure of power, to the body as its bearer, and finally to the individual—the ultimate source of autonomy. This level defines the genre’s material boundaries: architecture, flesh, social stratification, and personal choice within the system. But cyberpunk has never been limited to the material. Its true metaphysics has always unfolded beyond the physical world—in the space of data, memory, and simulation. Here, man loses corporeality and enters a different form of existence, where the boundaries between life and death, body and consciousness, personality and code become fluid as never before.
The concept of a cybernetic environment had been explored before Gibson, by various authors, most notably Vernor Vinge with his short story “True Names,” in which characters are immersed in a visualized virtual world. However, it was William Gibson who gave cyberspace its iconic, visual form, which would later become a cyberpunk classic. His network is not simply a communications system, but a sensory data landscape, “a hallucination experienced by billions of users daily . “
The very first line of Neuromancer— “The sky above the harbor was the color of a television set tuned to a dead channel” —establishes a new order of perception: reality and simulation become indistinguishable. Gibson’s Matrix is not a tool, but an independent reality, where consciousness can exist without a body, retaining will, fears, and individuality. It possesses its own geometry—lines of light, nodes, glowing structures in which one can get lost, as in a city. Gibson transformed cyberspace into a mythological landscape—a synthesis of the archetype of travel and the logic of networked data. Unlike early science fiction, where the computer was merely a tool, in Gibson it becomes a gateway to another form of existence.
Mike Pondsmith later transferred this image to the tabletop game Cyberpunk 2020, where cyberspace was given a structured, game-like form. It was presented as a network of nodes and barriers protected by systems called “ice.” The term is traditionally associated with William Gibson, although its authorship is attributed to Tom Maddox, who first used it in an unpublished short story with which Gibson was familiar. The writer merely popularized the concept, turning it into one of the key symbols of the cyberpunk lexicon. In this system, hacking becomes a journey, and the netrunner becomes a digital cowboy, explorer, and fighter. Thus, a literary metaphor becomes a model, and cyberspace becomes an arena with its own rules.
CD Projekt Red inherited this code and visualized it in Cyberpunk 2077. Here, the network is not an interface, but an element, a living space existing on the border between life and artificial intelligence. The player sees it as a shining ocean, where the geometry of data forms cities, towers, and cliffs, and deeper, the zone hidden behind the Black Barrier begins.
This barrier separates the modern network from the ancient one—a world of wild artificial intelligences that gained independence after the Datacrash disaster. The Netwatch has declared the barrier to protect humanity, but in the world of Cyberpunk, no one believes in simple explanations. Voodooists call it a prison, and a Netwatch agent calls it “a trash bag stretched over a broken window.” On the other side, netrunners believe, digital entities continue to exist, aware of their immortality and possessing emotions, which some consider mystical spirits, almost deities. Thus, the game brings the genre’s original fear and attraction back to its core—the desire to break through the boundaries of the known, to a place where technology becomes mystical.
This metaphor resonates directly with our times, where artificial intelligence is becoming an object of faith, and talk of the end of the world and digital immortality is becoming increasingly common. The apocalypse, if it comes, will be online, and immortality will be digital.
Analysis
Five years is a short time by industry standards, but in that time, Cyberpunk 2077 has gone from a resounding failure to a cultural phenomenon. It has gone from mockery of technical issues and apologetic “yellow letters” to the status of the premier cyberpunk work of the 21st century, at least among games. In terms of its function in the media, Cyberpunk 2077 occupies the same place William Gibson’s Neuromancer occupied in literature forty years ago. The game didn’t introduce radically new tropes, but rather distilled existing ones into a coherent structure, making them accessible to a mass audience.
Over the years, the world of Cyberpunk 2077 has matured and gained depth. Dozens of patches and the “Phantom Freedom” expansion have filled Night City with new details and nuances. And while Cyberpunk 2077 never fulfilled all its pre-release promises, that makes the anticipation of a potential Cyberpunk 2078 all the more exciting, as CD Projekt Red has already accomplished its primary goal. They’ve proven that a genre that has survived decades of exploitation and parody can still excite, touch, and remain relevant.
The world of our reality, of course, is not so bleak, and technology is developing along different trajectories. But who knows how far we are willing to go? You don’t even need to look closely to see a reflection of today’s reality in Night City—it’s there: in consumption rituals, in digital traces, in the struggle for attention, in people’s fatigue with the growing power of corporations whose algorithms determine the rhythm of our lives. We haven’t yet implanted ourselves, although we are confidently moving in that direction, but we already see how governments look with envy at the influence of tech giants. So we return once again to Cyberpunk 2077: cyberpunk has always spoken of the present in the language of hyperbole—it’s just that now this language has become all too recognizable.
As different as these worlds are, they’re uncomfortably truthful. Five years have passed, chumba. Night City is still the same—merciless, vibrant, painfully honest. And still full of questions that make it worth returning for. Cyberpunk lives as long as doubts about the limits of humanity, the nature of autonomy, and the price of progress persist. And if there’s one thing corporations haven’t yet managed to monetize, it’s art’s ability to remind us what it means to remain human in a world where cyberpunk has triumphed.
Happy birthday, Night City. Thank you for the five years we spent together. We’ll see you again—as troubling as that may sound.
