46 Fun Facts About Cyberpunk 2077

Which actor portrays Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077?

Keanu Reeves revealed the role himself on stage at E3 2019. When a fan yelled 'You're breathtaking!', he shouted it straight back, and the game kept the joke: collecting all of Johnny's belongings unlocks an achievement called Breathtaking.

Night City is an independent city-state wedged between which two Free States?

North and South California are what the old state became after it left the union and split in two, and the city sits on their border answering to neither. It began as Coronado City and was renamed after its founder was murdered.

Who murders Arasaka founder Saburo during the heist that kicks off the story?

His son Yorinobu kills him in a hotel suite, then tells security the old man has been poisoned. Two hired thieves are hiding in the room the whole time, which makes them the only outside witnesses to what really happened.

Which rock band did Johnny Silverhand front in the backstory of Cyberpunk 2077?

Samurai's songs are real recordings: the studio hired the Swedish punk band Refused to write and perform them. That makes the group's frontman, Dennis Lyxzén, the singing voice of Johnny Silverhand.

Which three lifepaths can players choose for V at the start of Cyberpunk 2077?

Nomad, Street Kid and Corpo each open with a different prologue: out in the Badlands, on the streets of Heywood or inside a corporate tower. After that the three paths merge, and the choice mostly shows up as the odd extra line of dialogue.

Whose tabletop role-playing game series is Cyberpunk 2077 based on?

Mike Pondsmith published the tabletop Cyberpunk in 1988 and joked, when Polish fans asked to translate it, that only a handful of people would ever play it. Some of that handful grew up to work at the studio that made the video game.

What is the biochip that V is forced to slot into their head during the botched heist called?

The Relic is an experimental chip that V pushes into their own head when its case breaks. It brings V back from a fatal gunshot, then begins swapping V's mind for the rock star stored on it, which leaves V living on borrowed time.

Which fixer hires V for the Arasaka heist and then shoots them and leaves them for dead?

Dexter DeShawn shoots V in the head when the job goes wrong and has the body dumped in a landfill to cover his tracks. It buys him very little: the murdered man's bodyguard catches up with him at that same landfill and kills him.

What destroyed Arasaka Tower in the 2023 raid where Johnny Silverhand died?

A nuclear bomb went off inside the tower in August 2023 and took the heart of the city with it. Nobody was ever officially found responsible, and the government of the day blamed Arasaka for setting off its own fail-safe device.

In Cyberpunk 2077, what is the Blackwall?

A firewall protecting the internet from rogue AIs, it was put up by the agency NetWatch after a famous hacker's virus wrecked the old Net. Everything beyond it was written off as a digital wasteland and left to the machines.

Who is Arasaka's fully cybernetic head of security, the man who killed Johnny Silverhand back in 2023?

Adam Smasher has swapped so much of himself for metal that barely any of the man is left. That old killing makes the last act personal: most routes to the ending go through him, with his victim riding along inside V's head.

Panam Palmer belongs to which nomad clan?

The Aldecaldos are her family, though when V meets her she has walked out after clashing with their leader and is scraping by as a mercenary in the city. Help her patch things up and the whole clan can ride with V in the final assault.

Rogue Amendiares owns which Night City nightclub?

The Afterlife is built inside a former morgue and keeps up the theme: its drinks are named after the famous dead. Rogue, who once ran jobs with Johnny, now owns it and works there as a fixer.

Night City's police unit for dealing with cyberpsychos is called what?

MaxTac is the squad that gets the call when someone with too many implants snaps. The player can do the same job more gently: a fixer hands out 17 cyberpsycho cases and would rather each target was knocked out alive and sent for treatment.

Which of these is one of the seven regions of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077?

Watson once had it all, from skyscrapers and corporate offices to a top medical centre, until an economic crash emptied it out. By 2077 it is known as the city's bad neighbourhood and is home turf for the Maelstrom gang.

What is a 'ripperdoc' in the world of Cyberpunk 2077?

A back-street surgeon who installs cyberware is the one contact no mercenary can do without. V's is an old friend, Viktor Vektor, who will fit new optics early on even if V can't pay, on a promise of payment after the next job.

Which type of ranged weapon in Cyberpunk 2077 fires homing bullets?

Smart weapons fire bullets that steer themselves towards a locked target, so careful aim is optional. The catch is hardware: the guidance only works once a Smart Link implant has been fitted in the shooter's hands.

Who is V's best friend and fellow mercenary, fatally wounded while escaping the Arasaka heist?

Jackie Welles meets V in every prologue, whichever past the player picks, and the two work as a team from then on. Badly hurt in the escape, he insists on carrying the stolen chip himself and hands it to V as he dies in the getaway cab.

Which actor stars in Phantom Liberty as secret agent Solomon Reed?

Idris Elba plays Reed as a weary sleeper agent for the federal intelligence service, lying low in the city until he is needed. When the stranded President wants the one operative she trusts completely, he is the man she sends V to find.

Which in-house CD Projekt game engine was used to build Cyberpunk 2077?

REDengine 4 turned out to be the end of the line for the studio's home-grown technology. In 2022 CD Projekt announced that its future games, the next Cyberpunk included, would be built in Unreal Engine 5 instead.

Which 1982 film did environment coordinator Hiroshi Sakakibara call the 'Bible of all cyberpunk'?

Ghost in the Shell, System Shock and Deus Ex were other touchstones; the yellow palette was chosen to stand apart from them.

Which of these is one of the four visual styles the art team used to explain Night City's history?

Entropism is the look of the lean years, summed up by the art team as necessity over style: dull colours, bulky cars and buildings nobody bothered to decorate. Kitsch, Neomilitarism and Neokitsch are the other three styles.

Which industrial designer and concept artist inspired the look of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City?

Dieter Rams and Syd Mead pull in opposite directions, which was the point. Rams's spare elegance was borrowed for the poorest, most worn-down streets, while Mead's bright colours and plastics define the flashy style the team calls Kitsch.

The Reaver, a gang's custom-built car in Cyberpunk 2077, was unveiled as a tribute to which 2015 film?

Mad Max: Fury Road turned five on 15 May 2020, and the studio marked the day by showing off the Reaver, a Wraith gang rebuild of the Quadra Type-66. The caption promised that drivers would 'ride eternal, shiny and chrome'.

Which hip hop duo wrote 'No Save Point' for Cyberpunk 2077, performing in-game as 'Yankee and the Brave'?

Run the Jewels took the alias from a track on their own 2020 album, so El-P and Killer Mike exist inside Night City as a fictional act.

Which real-life pop musician plays Lizzy Wizzy, a Night City pop star, in Cyberpunk 2077?

Grimes plays Lizzy Wizzy and also has music on the game's radio. V meets her through an anonymous job offer and a secret meeting in a motel room, the start of a short quest line that ends somewhere dark.

Before Cyberpunk 2077's third delay, in October 2020, the studio had announced the game had done what?

Gone gold means a game is judged complete and ready to ship, and the studio had said so earlier that month. Then the date slipped three more weeks to 10 December, after an official tweet had promised there would be no more delays.

A week after its troubled launch, which company pulled Cyberpunk 2077 from its online store for six months?

Sony took it off the PlayStation Store on 17 December 2020 and offered refunds. When it came back the following June the listing still carried a warning that buying it for a standard PS4 was 'not recommended'.

After Cyberpunk 2077's buggy launch, which group won a $1.85 million class-action settlement from CD Projekt?

Its investors sued within weeks of release, saying the company had hidden how badly the game ran on older consoles. Several suits were rolled into one, and the payout a judge approved in 2023 was a sliver of the first month's sales.

Leaked source code reportedly showed Cyberpunk 2077 content censored for China flagged under which children's character's name?

Winnie the Pooh is censored in China because of a meme likening him to President Xi, so the label reads as a studio in-joke. It surfaced in 2021 in a screenshot of code stolen by hackers, beside dull flags for things like nudity.

Which Cyberpunk 2077 sequence triggered a seizure in a Game Informer journalist, prompting the studio to rework it?

The braindance headset flashes red and white lights in V's face, a pattern she likened to a device doctors use to bring on seizures. The studio promised a warning within a day and changed the animation in a patch the day after launch.

Which 2022 Netflix anime from Studio Trigger helped turn around sales of Cyberpunk 2077?

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners arrived in September 2022 alongside an update hiding gear from the series around the city. Two years after a disastrous launch, the company credited the show, along with a long run of fixes, for sales climbing again.

Update 2.2, released unexpectedly at the end of 2024, added what feature?

Update 2.1 had already added the Metro and extra scenes with V's romantic interest.

Cyberpunk 2077's boxed Switch 2 edition drew attention in 2025 for shipping how?

On a full 64GB cartridge, with the whole game and its expansion on the card. That stood out because nearly every other third-party Switch 2 game announced then was a Game-Key Card, a cartridge that only unlocks a download.

Cyberpunk 2077 won its first Game Award, three years after release, in which category?

Best Ongoing Game rewards titles that keep improving after launch, and 2023 made the case: a 2.0 overhaul of the game's systems and the Phantom Liberty expansion. When it was first eligible, two years earlier, it had gone home empty-handed.

The comic Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams won which science fiction award at a ceremony in China in 2023?

Hugo Award voters named it Best Graphic Story or Comic in Chengdu, ahead of a Dune adaptation. The story of two scavengers who steal implants for a living, it began as a free digital extra for people who bought the game on GOG.

What internal codename did CD Projekt give the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel it announced in 2022?

Project Orion came out of a 2022 roadmap in which CD Projekt named its future games after the night sky: the next Witcher saga opens with Polaris, and a Witcher spin-off is Sirius. It opened a new studio in Boston to make the sequel.

Which sci-fi author called Cyberpunk 2077's 2018 trailer 'GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future'?

William Gibson, whose 1984 novel Neuromancer made him the father of cyberpunk, tweeted the put-down and added 'but hey, that's just me'. He came round later, posting that newer footage looked much better and had 'dirt in the corners'.

Which talking pistol in Cyberpunk 2077 offers two modes, Stone Cold Killer and Puppy-Loving Pacifist?

Skippy is a chatty pistol V finds beside a corpse in an alley. Pick the mode that only goes for headshots and there is a catch: after 50 kills the gun switches itself to the gentle mode, which aims for the legs, and stays there.

In the street slang of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City, what is a 'choom'?

A friend: the word is short for 'choomba', and its opposite number in the city's slang is 'gonk', an idiot. It has escaped the game too, with one of the studio's lead designers thanking players online as 'my chooms'.

Whose song 'I Really Want to Stay at Your House' topped a Billboard chart after featuring in Cyberpunk 2077's anime spin-off?

Rosa Walton's track had been playing on the game's in-game radio since 2020. Two years later the anime leaned on it heavily, and streams sent it to No. 1 on Billboard's Top TV Songs chart for September 2022.

Which famous Japanese game director has a cameo in the hotel bar just before Cyberpunk 2077's big heist?

Hideo Kojima sits at a table in the hotel bar, playing a developer called Oshima. The scene is easy to miss, since looking around is optional, but walk close and he holds forth about putting real human emotion into his work.

The Cyberpunk 2077-themed Xbox One X holds what distinction?

The final limited edition of that console was announced in April 2020, months before a new Xbox generation took over. It came with a download of the game, which then slipped twice more, so buyers had the machine long before they could play.

Which transit feature did Cyberpunk 2077's Update 2.1 finally add in December 2023, three years after launch?

A working Metro system opened with 19 stations on five lines. Players can treat the stations as fast-travel points or actually board a train and ride it across the city, watching the districts slide past the window.

In Phantom Liberty, V must rescue the NUSA president after her aircraft crashes in which district?

Dogtown is a lawless corner of Pacifica run by the warlord Kurt Hansen and his private militia, Barghest. When the President's plane comes down inside it, her only way out alive is V, a local mercenary recruited on the spot.

In Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion, which netrunner offers V a cure in exchange for saving the President?

Songbird, real name So Mi, is the President's own netrunner and a near-constant presence through the expansion. Her offer hides a catch she admits only late on: the cure works just once, and she planned to use it on herself.