Cyberpunk 2077 Revives the Dystopian Fears of the 1980s

Still, Night City, despite how alien its strange technology and architecture may appear, represents a future very much in touch with the concerns of our present day.Cyberpunk follows V, a character created by the player who ends up entangled in the politics of Night City’s most powerful megacorporation, Arasaka, and fighting for their life after a heist gone wrong. Its arrival, as banal as it might seem to those of us living through it, has given us the kind of grim future that the creators of cyberpunk imagined in books, films, and games.“With each set of … books, I’ve commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day,” Gibson said in a New Yorker profile. His children and top aide, Goro Takemura, are shallowly portrayed as stoic, uncompromising, or ruthless—exotic Others whose dispassion and boundless influence over Night City seem to have sprung from the sweat-soaked nightmares of a 1980s Wall Street trader.It’s a shame that these kinds of depictions are present in Cyberpunk when so many other aspects of the game manage to prove the merits of the genre as a modern framework for dystopian storytelling.