CHAPTER 2.1: CYBERPUNK 2077'S TAKE ON THE FUTURE
Controversies have arisen around Cyberpunk 2077’s portrayal of race and gender in its futuristic, urban America setting—some of which will be addressed later on in this chapter. The most wide-reaching dialogue around the game has centered around what the trailers, demos, and screenshots tell us so far about how the cyberpunk subgenre will be portrayed through the narrative and environment. Even the title itself seems to claim possession over cyberpunk, as seen with the discussions surrounding CD Projekt Red’s decision three years ago to trademark the word itself (Bayus). Through its blunt science-fiction references seen in and out of the game, Cyberpunk 2077 hearkens to the very foundations of its subgenre. The game’s central environment is a neon-drenched metropolis named Night City, a straight evocation of cyberpunk’s most common trope: rainy and dark streets punctuated by the glow of unstable technology.
This is but one of many examples of Cyberpunk 2077 situating itself squarely in the iconography of its subgenre. But more than anything, to associate itself with cyberpunk and “the future,” Cyberpunk 2077 has dressed itself in the design sensibilities of glitch art. The aesthetics of technological failure, of objective disruption within a machine, are used with intention to bolster the game’s genre credibility.
Take the 2018 world premier trailer for the game as an example, the first real look the mainstream got at the visual style of Cyberpunk 2077. The trailer opens with a close-up of a glowing Night City subway map and a gruff male voice-over. Within the first few seconds of this trailer, the map flickers and threatens to fade to black, like a malfunctioning computer screen with a bad refresh rate.
The scene pans from this map to reveal a subway car packed with shadowy figures—most of them wearing leather jackets, sporting colorful mohawks, and covered in tattoos. As this scene is revealed, the voiceover begins by saying “In 2077 they voted my city the worst place to live in America. Main issues: sky-high rate of violence, and more people living below the poverty line than anywhere else.” By the time the voice—our protagonist—is done saying this, the camera has followed one of these subway-goers from his seat to a spot at the window, keeping his face out of sight and spending ample time on the glowing skull logo emblazoned on the back of his jacket. Light spills from the window as the subway goes above ground and the Night City skyline is revealed.
The scene ends with CD Projekt Red’s title card, except it has been altered to mimic the effects of another sort of visual glitch. A slash runs diagonally across the logo.
