Cyberpunk 2077 was quite likely the most desired and then reviled work of east European media in 2020. CD Projekt Red briefly became Poland's most valuable company when the game launched on December 10, 2020, and sold thirteen million copies in ten days. The game was fiercely anticipated, promising an interactive futuristic city, deeply customizable identities, and a complex world of oppressive corporations and anarchistic rebels to explore. Then, immediately after release came a wave of fan outrage and a substantial stock-market crash: the game was shipped riddled with bugs, some amusing, others game-breaking, and simply did not work on some consoles, leading PlayStation to initiate an unprecedented recall of the game through their digital store. Numerous corporate apologies followed, as well as new scandals such as news of the excessive hours that game designers were forced to work in the final months of development, but the rage of fans never abated. CD Projekt Red had a stellar reputation heading into the release, as the most famous and influential east European game developer, the creators of the extraordinarily popular Witcher video game franchise, and the owners of GOG, the sole online vendor specializing in re-releasing games from prior decades, too old to run on contemporary computers. Despite the fraught release, Cyberpunk continued to sell to millions and a solid portion of those millions ended up angrily discussing the game online—and occasionally sending death threats to the game designers.
The situation was ironic to say the least: corporate greed and abuse of workers led to a major backlash against the very corporation making the game—a game whose major message, as is consistent with the cyberpunk genre, was to never trust greedy corporations. Cyberpunk 2077 failed to offer the immersive world it promised, but where it shined was the narrative. The game explored a structural contradiction in cyberpunk—anarchist protagonists fighting corporate hegemony by territorializing their own bodies with corporate technology. Cyberpunk 2077 not only continues this tradition with corporate body modifications and weapons galore, but with the main plot, where the protagonist and their best friend steal what they believe to be a corporate immortality chip, but which turns out to contain the recorded identity of a famous dead rock star and revolutionary (voiced and acted by Keanu Reeves). This revolutionary perished while attempting to destroy capitalism, but now comes back to live within your character—and will utterly overwrite their entire identity within a few months, taking over their body.
In Cyberpunk 2077, you are thus possessed by the literal ghost of the Revolution, implanted inside you with malevolent corporate technology, and whose basic assumption is that human bodies such as yours are disposable terrain to colonize. The crucial choices in the game come down to trusting the corporation (a ruinous decision); escaping your body for the immortality of the internet, leaving the ghost of Revolution in charge; willingly allowing the ghost of Revolution to take over, to destroy capitalism together (or at least one major corporation); or refusing all these choices, and keeping your body alive, if only for a few months, before it inevitably dies from the implant, as a nomad in the wasteland outside corporate civilization. For this grand vision of overthrowing capitalism (however cynical its corporate origin), Cyberpunk deserves at least a bit of critical attention, especially as online, and in most gaming communities, it is still demonized for delivering less than the impossibilities that CD Projekt Red unwisely promised.
