Haunted by the Past: The Nostalgic Future of “Cyberpunk 2077”
“THE SKY ABOVE the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” The opening sentence of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the most prototypical cyberpunk novel and the seed of the genre’s cultural proliferation, encapsulates the issues of contemporary cyberpunk fiction on several interpretative levels. This holds especially true for Cyberpunk 2077, a video game by Polish developer CD Projekt Red that has been in the making for more than seven years and has become infamous for its continual delays, clumsy handling of identity politics, and conscious catering to a somewhat toxic gaming fandom.