Cyberpunk 2077 Does Justice To Source Material, Says Cyberpunk 2020 Creator

Cyberpunk 2077 is slated to blow the roof off the place when it releases in early 2020. But speaking of 2020, as we’ve detailed before, the game is actually based on, and will take place in, the tabletop game universe of Cyberpunk 2020. The original creator of that game is Mike Pondsmith, and he’s actually updating the tabletop game to go along with 2077. But there’s always the question of how close something lands when it comes to adaptations. Well, we players will have to wait and see until April next year, but as of now, Pondsmith seems impressed.

In a lengthy interview with VGC, Pondsmith talked about a wide range of topics, from whether he felt the timing of the release was poor due to the next generation of consoles coming soon, to how his wife actually guessed Keanu Reeves was going to be in the game, and how well he felt 2077 did justice to his original creation. He feels the game does 2020 a lot of justice, and he attributes a lot of that to the fact that the developers were fans of the game, and through playing it extensively, absorbed a lot of what made 2020 special. He even revealed that the licenses had been optioned before, but with CD Projekt RED, he felt truly confident in their abilities to pull it off.

“The reason is that from the start CDPR are fans: they play the [pen and paper] game,” said Pondsmith. “Many of them grew up playing the game. So this is like a bunch of guys who watched the Star Wars movies as kids and then got a chance to make a Star Wars game: they would do the best damn job they could.

“That is why we went with them. This game has been optioned for years to many, many different studios. But what I saw in CD Projekt was that they really cared about it and the things that were important to us were important to them. So I knew it was in good hands.

“We have a unique take on the cyberpunk genre: it’s a heroic kind of cyberpunk in this sort of dirty, gritty way, but you can still be the hero. That’s unusual for the genre and a lot of the game companies who have been interested before saw maybe the Blade Runner-esque qualities, but they didn’t see the weird, fun and dangerous, risky elements. It’s hard to describe. It was the ethos of the 80s, that a lone person with a gun and an attitude could change the world.”

That’s some high praise from the man who started it all. Cyberpunk 2077 will release April 16th, 2020 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC.