Spend any time on the internet where fans of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 gather and you’ll see endless photos of various versions of protagonist V hanging out with any number of NPCs from the game. Some shots depict scenes that are very much inspired by the direct gameplay: car chases, shootouts, explosions, and just all around violence and badassery.
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But just as often, if not more so, what you find are slice-of-life stills depicting characters hanging in V’s apartment or on various street corners of Night City. Grabbing food. Shooting the shit. Flirting. Sharing intimacy. Some of them are intentionally silly. Others look like the chapters of V’s life we never see in the actual game, but that likely exist in our personal headcanons of what an evening with V and Jackie looks like. We may look at the dark future depicted in Cyberpunk 2077 and despair. True, the gloom is part of the experience and the genre. But equally, the celebration of the people who persist through that gloom is what is so critical to the genre of cyberpunk itself, and what is proudly on display in these fan photos.
The punks demand to be seen
These images show off the less flashy parts of the game. The pretty graphics of Cyberpunk help, but it’s the people who live in this digital realm who are in focus, not just how well they’re rendered. Each shot is just a buncha chooms, the punks, captured by way of the game’s recently expanded photo mode, which has only enabled more fans to live out the very spirit of what writer Bruce Bethke thought to capture when he coined the very term itself: Cyberpunk.
It is fitting, too, that these images are largely created by the ones who occupy the digital grunge of Night City: those of us who have, probably on more than one occasion, rolled up a new V to hit the streets, take on jobs and, perhaps more importantly, to spend more time with the characters of this world. The images reveal we’re drawn back to Night City by more than just a desire for digital coin and the thrills of a shootout. A quest may come and go, but a shot with V and Judy sharing a moment alone together under the lights of Night City stays, shared in our real life cyberspace, its rewards far more than some XP.
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Cyberpunk 2077 was a messy-as-hell game when it came out. It took a long, long time for it to redeem itself in the eyes of many. Some, such as myself, found something resonant in those early days. But it’s clear that as the game has improved, fans see something special not so much in the technical prowess of what CD Projekt Red achieved, but rather in the characters, the expressions of social cohesion and a celebration of life and identity that many of us might see ourselves in.
Perhaps it’s the result of a real world that perpetually feels like it’s becoming a cyberpunk story itself. But even so, the fact that so many fans are celebrating a kind of digital, prosthetic human expression through the creation and sharing of these images recenters who is under the punishing skyscrapers of corpo-distributed high-tech that dominate the Night City skyline: us imperfect, tattooed, chromed-up punks.
As our world continues to make us feel like we are in Night City, hopefully we persist in documenting our own humanity as much as fans of Cyberpunk 2077 have virtually celebrated the time they’ve spent with V and the gang.
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