Cyberpunk 2077's fascinating afterlife

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If' there's anything as fascinating is the incubation of a triple-A game - something exposed in spectacular fashion last weekend by the GTA 6 drama, with leaks that stripped away the gloss and exposed the wheels and cogs (as well as the ignorance of how exactly video games are made, something we could all do a better job of educating each other on) - it's the afterlife of a modern-day blockbuster. Even better when it's one as derided as Cyberpunk 2077 was at launch.

Why exactly CD Projekt's sci-fi spectacular was the subject of such ire when it launched at the tail-end of 2020 is a topic too multifaceted to properly unpick with the 600 or so words we have here; there was some righteous anger about the appalling working conditions Cyberpunk 2077 was made under at times, a hype cycle that even the most accomplished of games would buckle under, a more than messy launch as it awkwardly straddled two generations of hardware and, ultimately, a good old-fashioned pile-on that obscured all else. There’s rarely room for nuance in internet discourse, and the noise around Cyberpunk 2077’s launch is proof perfect of that.

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