Cyberpunk 2077 is arguably one of the most anticipated upcoming games. Despite numerous delays to ensure the best end result, CD Projekt Red's sci-fi RPG has the entire gaming community abuzz with excitement. Announced way back in 2013, it immediately caught everyone's attention - but this popularity isn't unfounded. The game is the latest entry in a franchise stretching back to 1988.
Some might think it's awfully generic to wear a genre as a name, but there's good reason for it - Cyberpunk is what named the genre in the first place. Conceived as a tabletop RPG game in 1988 by Mike Pondsmith, it sought to transplant the atmosphere of the cyberpunk fiction - named as such later, of course - into a playable format. Blade Runner and the novel Hardwired were the biggest inspirations, with the author of the latter - Walter Jon Williams - actually helping with playtests.
Cyberpunk's iconic dystopian future setting where greedy mega-corporations have taken control and wrangled technology to suit their needs has become synonymous with the game's name. The future is high-tech, but not the elegant, clean, muted high-tech we see in settings like Star Trek. Neon-drenched, gritty, dirty and unforgiving, Cyberpunk is a world of squalor, cybernetic prosthesis and rampant crime.
In Pondsmith's original setup, the Cyberpunk timeline is adjacent to the real world, diverging after 1990. The first edition's story was set in 2013 - and we're very lucky it didn't end up being prophetic - with subsequent editions moving forward in the timeline through 2020 all the way to the late 2030's. CDPR's game is set in 2077, as the title implies.
This allows the developers to enjoy a greater degree of freedom from the old source material which, unfortunately, most players these days are not familiar with. That said, many easter eggs and callbacks will be present in the game. The 2077 setting also places the game's events comfortably in the distant future, making the kind of technology that is currently impossible seem plausible.
