What It Means To Be Human: The Long Journey Of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’
The year is 2019, and gender is fluid
In September of this year, the Merriam-Webster dictionary officially expanded the definition of the word ‘they’ to include: “used to refer to a single person whose gender identity is nonbinary”. Also broadened was the definition of ‘inclusive’: “allowing and accommodating people who have historically been excluded (as because of their race, gender, sexuality, or ability)”.
These additions to the dictionary represent a turning point of validation for how human beings are viewed and treated. A small, yet undeniable, forward step of progress for 7.5 billion people on this planet in the early stages of the 21st century. This is just how the world is now. It’s in the dictionary.
With that in mind, it makes sense that a form of entertainment as global as video games would eventually reflect this progress. More specifically, when developing a game that is entrenched in a genre which is the most distinctly reflective of where we’re headed as a society, and who you are as an individual, trends like these can’t be denied. They must be inclusive.
John Mamais is the head of CD Projekt RED’s Krakow studio, working on the upcoming dystopian role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated video games in recent years. CD Projekt RED made the decision this year to adjust the game’s character creator to no longer be defined by binary male and female options, but to take a more 2019 approach. You can now create a character that isn’t bound by gender.
“It’s a simple switch,” Mamais tell me. “You just choose a body type now. There’s only voices that sound either male or female. We didn’t have to do a lot to make that change, even in the dialogue systems. It’s really just a UI element to do this switch where you don’t pick a boy or girl. It was a really clever way to solve a problem without it impacting development too much. The way the game played was already gender-agnostic so despite which character you chose, you could do everything and the romantic options didn’t change. It was a really fast solution and a smart decision.”
CD Projekt’s studios are located in Poland’s two biggest cities, Warsaw and Krakow. The country as a whole has seen an explosion in recent years in successful game development. Studios like Bloober Team (Observer, Layers Of Fear), Reikon Games (Ruiner) and Techland (Dead Island, Dying Light) have made massive strides in storytelling and game design in genres like horror, science-fiction and even cyberpunk itself. Throughout these different storytellers, there has always been a common theme in these tales of how human beings treat each other, for better or worse.
If there’s a genre of fiction that seems to consistently resonate on a very personal level with fans, it’s cyberpunk.
Mamais, who is based in Krakow, explains that the Polish game industry in 2019 might be in the best place it has ever been. “For a long time, it seems like it’s been in a good place. Techland is really big studio, and they’re doing pretty cool stuff, and there’s lots of indie studios happening, there’s lots of indie groups meeting up all the time in Krakow, and there’s a lot of money coming from Europe. We even benefit from European grants for research and development stuff and I’m sure other smaller teams are too. There’s plenty of venture capital in Poland too. If you look at CD Projekt’s stock, it’s skyrocketed somehow. There’s a lot of cash moving around in Poland now, and people are getting money to start game development studios, and it’s a very healthy environment.”
Cyberpunk 2077 tells the story of V, an outlaw mercenary scraping out a living in the futuristic mega-metropolis of Night City. With set back-stories to choose from (Nomad, Corpo or Street Kid), and the binary or non-binary options built into the character creator, CD Projekt is ensuring the player can create their version of V.
If there’s a genre of fiction that seems to consistently resonate on a very personal level with fans, it’s cyberpunk. The role of identity and individuality are massive themes. Whether it is through fighting for your particular piece of the gutter or displaying your idiosyncrasies with fashion or cyberwear, this is a sub-genre where positive and personal expression matters most. Inherent to this particular world is ‘style over substance’, a guideline first written in the tabletop sourcebook of Cyberpunk 2020.
The year is 2020, and almost two dozen cities in India have run out of water
Ninety-eight percent of the planet’s available freshwater is groundwater, defined as water found beneath the Earth’s surface in areas of 100 percent saturation. Anything less than 100 percent and it’s just soil moisture, unsuitable for drinking.
In 2020, cities like New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and eighteen others in India will run out of freely available groundwater. Due to weakening monsoon seasons and higher annual temperatures, this catastrophic change will affect more than 100 million people. Lakes are running dry, and the irrigation required for the country’s agriculture industry is now insufficient.
Devastating changes like this are inevitable across the globe. United Nations climate experts and physicists say that 2020 is the deadline to act on climate change before it’s too late. By ‘too late’, they mean until irreversible destruction takes hold upon numerous countries around the world.
A handful of companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP are responsible for over a third of the world’s carbon emissions. While they enjoy record profits of billions of dollars, the Earth has degraded. More than $200 million is spent each year by these companies to lobby politicians and governments to do nothing about the effects of climate change and give them and other megacorporations free reign to continue pumping out enough pollution to block out the sun.
Cyberpunk 2077 will finally see the light of day in 2020. In classic tales of this dystopian genre, most events take place at night, and if we do see the sun, it is typically muted behind pollution or rain clouds. 2077 will feature a day-night cycle, dynamic weather and even acid rain.
For John Mamais, that final stage of development is quickly approaching. “2020 seems like tomorrow. At the end, it’s a shitload of work — but you have a very clear-cut path. Before, the tools weren’t as stable as they are now, and some of them weren’t even built. So not every team could go at one hundred percent. But now, everybody’s moving at a hundred percent. The best part is when you see it all come together; it’s really gratifying. Then you can sit back and enjoy it”.
In the history of the Cyberpunk universe, a large-scale conflict known as the Fourth Corporate War begins in 2020 and ends with skyscraper gunfights and a nuclear blast which decimates parts of Night City. The ramifications of this war and the effects of the people who died will be intertwined with the events of Cyberpunk 2077.
The year is 2077, and the world’s population is approaching 10 billion
Every five minutes, over a thousand people are born on Earth. By 2077, the planet will contain almost ten times the amount of human beings that it is currently designed to sustain, successfully. By this time, commercial mining of Earth’s moon has become both possible and viable. The span of collective deforestation in the world now almost matches the landmass of Asia, and the number of ‘dead zones’ in the world’s oceans where little to no life can flourish due to human pollution has increased by the hundreds. By the year 2077, more than 300 million homes around have been destroyed by rising sea levels.
The world outside our windows and the world depicted in Cyberpunk 2077 barrel toward each other – two machines with interlocking parts, aligning more and more as the weeks and months pass. The creeping dread accompanying this unprecedented strain of post-millennium tension rises exponentially with every news story about record-breaking protests against governments, powerful corporations creating their own laws and corrupt politicians convincing voters that ignorance and subservience are the only qualifications you need today to get ahead. It is a recipe which creates the ideal breeding ground for a cyberpunk world.
Mamais says they didn’t want the current state of the world, no matter how many real-life parallels it continued to produce, to influence their vision of the future. “There was a decision made early on to establish a setting where we wouldn’t have to worry about these things. The idea was – what would 2077 be like in the 1990s? There’s not a lot of people walking in the game with cell phones.”
“We always try to set goals, and we planned it all out. High-level planning. It always changes, and it’s madness because it’s changing so much, so frequently. If something’s just not good enough, we change it again. If the team doesn’t hit a specific goal, there are reasons behind it, but it’s not a science. It’s not so easy to plan that shit, especially gameplay and programming. It’s really difficult to estimate stuff when you’re doing it for the first time. You can plan things out, like assets, but not even that because technology’s evolving and that affects the content as well. You get to a point later in a project where you can safely estimate how long it’s going to take to do something and then it will work.”
Building a convincing world is nothing new for CD Projekt RED.
Cyberpunk 2077 is set in the fictional locale of Night City. A colossal city, still recovering from years of violent mob rule which ended with even more violence on the part of paramilitary megacorporations. With countless government-displaced homeless residents and its outskirts surrounded by the ruined Badlands, Night City is cut into six districts, all with their own evidence of the permanent wound inflicted by the city’s history which separates the rich and powerful from the poor and downtrodden.
Building a convincing world is nothing new for CD Projekt RED. With their history creating regions like Novigrad, Skellige and Velen in the Witcher series, their mission with Cyberpunk 2077 was to take the vast expanse of the magical realms inhabited by Geralt of Rivia and push it up into the sky. Night City is a vertical metropolis with more areas to explore inside the countless levels of its towers and skyscrapers, areas that most recent open-world games have only used sparingly, if at all.
In terms of content, this studio knows its strengths. Designing compelling things for the player to do is the lifeblood of any good role-playing games and as CDPR proved with the Witcher series, Mamais knows that even the smallest journeys require depth to leave an impact. “The quest system is very similar in Cyberpunk. Main quests, side quests, minor quests, just like they had in the Witcher. And the open-world is a bit more deeper. In the Witcher, the open-world team was formed really late in development. We were all focused on classes and stuff, we’d never done open-world before, and it turned out really cool. But now in Cyberpunk, it’s going to be way cooler because we started from the beginning.”
“The way the open-world works is active and passive. So the passive bits are like the crowds, with people talking and you can interact with them in some way. There’s vendors and traffic, and all the living stuff is part of that. There’s quest designers, and there’s open-world designers. The quest designers work very closely with the cinematic designers, and they’re creating this cinematic narrative. They spend a lot of time doing motion capture and cut-scene quality and all the stuff that’s happening when you’re experiencing the story. It’s heavy in dialogue, and it’s very rich in that way.”
“In the open-world, we have street stories. It’s a big city and a big world to explore so we have to fill it with content. The street stories are things like an escort or a stash you need to find or someone you need to kill. They’re like small contracts you get from different contracts in the universe. There’s a lot of those, and then there’s minor activities and combat events. Those are kind of half-passive.”
Night City was created way before CD Projekt Red even existed. These dangerous streets and ruthless megacorps were born out of the mind of Mike Pondsmith, a tabletop game designer from California. The first edition of ‘Cyberpunk’, as it was simply known, was released decades prior, when Super Mario Bros 2 and Altered Beast were the top video games in stores. Back then, if you opened a copy of Cyberpunk and fell in, Pondsmith transported the player to the futuristic and deadly year of 2013.
The year is 2013, and Edward Snowden blows the whistle on government surveillance
The former CIA contractor now lives under asylum in Moscow. In 2013, Snowden stole files from the National Security Agency and showed the world the terrifying extent of a global surveillance apparatus which the United States government ran in conjunction with organisations in the UK, Canada and Australia. If these organisations possessed something as simple as a person’s email address, they could monitor every aspect of a citizen’s lives, from phone calls to private messages. And these government agencies paid telecommunications companies millions of dollars to help them do it. Corporate entities and government organisations working together in corrupt partnerships to secretly keep citizens under their boot.
On paper, 2013 isn’t all that long ago — it’s only six years. But considering the events that have occurred on the world stage, it seems three times as long. The animated movie Frozen sitting atop the worldwide box office doesn’t sound like a long time ago but the idea of four more years of Barack Obama being in the White House feels about as recent as the Vietnam War.
2013 was when the world first saw anything from Cyberpunk 2077. Its first teaser trailer featuring a cybernetically-enhanced woman surrounded by masked cops received millions of views. Throughout the years, CDPR would release drips of information and scant gameplay details until 2018, when a second trailer was released and dispelled any fears that development on the game had been abandoned. A year later, several gameplay videos were given to the media and the public along with a confirmed release date and, to everyone’s surprise, the revelation of Keanu Reeves in a starring role as rockerboy Johnny Silverhand.
Despite the level of excitement reaching fever pitch, this game’s development has been a slow burn, and Mamais struggles to remember the years since 2013. “It’s all a blur to me, man. I don’t really look at the past, and I have a shitty memory anyway. I’ve had two kids since I’ve been in Poland making these games.”
“We built a team to work on Cyberpunk starting back then. We built that team, and then we dissolved it and incorporated those guys back into Witcher 3. We kept going a little bit with a writing team. Then we finished Witcher 3, finished the expansions, then we all jumped back on to Cyberpunk and kind of started again.”
“The heroes and villains of cyberpunk fiction aren’t mythic characters with superpowers. They’re people with flaws, dreams and desires…”
Cyberpunk 2077 wouldn’t exist without the tabletop pen-and-paper RPG that it is based on. Created by Mike Pondsmith, the first 44-page edition of Cyberpunk: The Roleplaying Game Of The Dark Future, later known as Cyberpunk 2020, established the world, the characters and the desperation of this universe.
Back in the real world, I sat down with Mike Pondsmith in 2013, and he told me about what fuels his vision for the future, which is now perhaps more relevant than ever. Calm and collected with a booming deep voice, Pondsmith is the kind of storyteller you could listen to for hours on end as he explains the dangerous corners of his Night City.
“You never get tired of the romance of the street,” he told me, six years ago. “The world is catching up on a lot of what I envisioned in the original Cyberpunk. The heroes and villains of cyberpunk fiction aren’t mythic characters with superpowers. They’re people with flaws, dreams and desires just like the readers have. In a cyberpunk future, the very act of making a living can be both dangerous and romantic and not all that dissimilar to making a living today. You are part of the events, but you’re not the centre. You’re a little hero instead of a big damn hero. The battles you fight may be small, but they can occasionally have huge effects on the world. But what counts is how those battles affect you and the people you care about.”
Upon its release, Cyberpunk 2077 will have taken roughly eight years to make. In video games that is a long time, but somehow outside of that industry it feels even longer. Pondsmith knows the ups and downs of this ongoing journey better than anyone. The year in which the first edition of Cyberpunk is set has now passed, and 2077 will be released in the year when his second edition takes place. 2013, then 2020, and now 2077. With a lot of years in between.
Since the beginning, Pondsmith has clear memories of expanding his vision beyond the pen and paper for a number of decades. “We’ve been through the mill since the late eighties trying to get a workable Cyberpunk game project going. I’ve lost track of how many times companies optioned 2020. It’s been ‘going to be a video game’ since at least 1988.”
The year is 1988, and Al-Qaeda is formed.
Peshawar is the oldest city in Pakistan, dating back to 539 BCE. In August of 1988, three men had a meeting in the city to form a ‘base’ or ‘foundation’ group with the help of Saudi money and years of mujahideen fighting. The group would be called ‘Al-Qaeda’, and the three men were Ayman al-Zawahiri, Sayyed Al-Sharif and Osama Bin Laden.
To say that the actions of this group derailed a potential future for the human race is quite the understatement. The effects of the 9/11 attacks, the subsequent global wars it spawned and the rise of extremism and unease within Western society in the years that followed were all born from that Peshawar meeting. No matter how many angles from which you approach it, it’s all but inconceivable to imagine how the 21st century would have played out if it had not been entirely directed and shaped by the actions of these men.
In the world of Cyberpunk, this entire region of the planet, including countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya and the United Arab Emirates, is now a radioactive wasteland. Due to years of nuclear war, this area of the planet has been rendered uninhabitable. As a direct result oil prices soared worldwide, and the unravelling of Western civilisation had begun.
In 1988, Mike Pondsmith published Cyberpunk when he was 34 years old. The release of Cyberpunk 2077 coincides with the week of his 66th birthday. He founded his tabletop game company, R. Talisorian Games, in the mid-’80s and went on to make numerous titles with names like Mekton and Castle Falkenstein. But it was the tale of megacorps and cybernetics which proved to strike the biggest chord with fans upon its release. Further rulebooks, expansions and novels were published to flesh out the world of Cyberpunk 2020, due to popular demand.
Early in development, John Mamais and his team understood the lineage of Pondsmith’s work. He wanted to ensure their game — and its extrapolation of the events in Cyberpunk — matched what had initially fallen out of his mind and onto the page. He was also aware of the challenges of making the game work as a video game instead of a book. “The whole history that was built for 2077 is something that we’ve collaborated with Mike Pondsmith on, and it fits in with his canon. It gave us a foundation to build from.”
Whereas most rules in fictional worlds are built to restrict, here they are designed to boost confidence.
“We got creative license to do what we wanted to do with this stuff, but we worked closely with Mike to make sure it was cool. That’s how we operate. I don’t think we do deals without having our own creative licence so we can do what we want to with the property. It’s too hard to try to adapt his books exactly as the pen-and-paper RPG; it just wouldn’t be fun as a video game. But we’re not stupid – in terms of the lore, we don’t want to screw it up. We’re taking the lore pretty close to what it was.”
Within the world of Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk, certain directives are written. Whereas most rules in fictional worlds are built to restrict, here they are designed to boost confidence. “Never walk into a room when you can stride in”, “Be the action, start the rebellion, light the fire” and “Stay committed to the Edge” are all rules from the Cyberpunk 2020 sourcebook. They give the player enough self-esteem to take on megacorporations, fight for what’s theirs and always taking the time to look damn good while doing it. Concepts such as these naturally resonate deep in the soul with people of all ages living in 2019.
The year is 2019 and Cyberpunk 2077 is almost finished.
After eight years of development, John Mamais seems exhausted but still maintains a high level of excitement when talking about the game. It is evident in everything he says, even when he lists what remains on the development schedule before release. “Testing, bug-fixing, still finishing content, post-production, lighting, visual effects, gameplay balancing, all that shit. There’s a lot left to do.”
The genre of cyberpunk continues to evoke passion in not only its fans but also people working for years to bring it to life. If there weren’t so many personally profound themes and concepts within this genre of entertainment, game developers wouldn’t want to spend almost a decade bringing it to life. And pen-and-paper RPG books wouldn’t still sell more than thirty years after their publication.
Allowing players to reflect who they truly are and not be bound by something as binary as gender is not only a smart move for Cyberpunk 2077, it’s the thing that makes the most sense.
Cyberpunk 2077 and the genre itself is about creating your own personal future from scratch. Most people in this universe have nothing but a few credits, some low-grade tech and the unwavering will to survive. When confronted with faceless corporations and governments doing everything they can to take away who we are as human beings, individuality becomes more important than ever. A strong belief in ourselves begins to take hold and informs everything we say and do, regardless of how dangerous this new inner confidence may be.
Allowing players to reflect who they truly are and not be bound by something as binary as gender is not only a smart move for Cyberpunk 2077, it’s the thing that makes the most sense. Because whether it is within the boundaries of a fictional universe or in the one we see every day, if we don’t create our own personal future, the worst kind of people will do it for us.
David Rayfield writes good things in good places like Junkee. Tweet him at @raygunbrown