Braindancing in Night City

Cyberpunk is a genre; a dystopic vision of the future exemplified by films like Blade Runner and books like Neuromancer. But it’s also a game. First released in 1988 and designed by Mike Pondsmith, Cyberpunk took the style and feeling of the works of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and adapted them for the pen-and-paper RPG crowd. It spanned three editions and dozens of books, but with the help of developer CD Projekt Red it will soon see its biggest transformation yet: turning into a video game. We still don’t know everything about Cyberpunk 2077, the game that catapults the series five decades into the future, but its clear CD Projekt is looking to capture the same feeling that made the RPG series so enduring. “We want to assure fans of the pen-and-paper game that this is still the same Cyberpunk you know,” says lead gameplay designer Marcin Janiszewski. “Night City has changed in the intervening decades, but still there are places that you know — this still is the same city.”