Cyberpunk 2077 cost roughly $440 million to make, turned a profit on 8 million pre-orders before launch day, and then shipped so broken that Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store for six months. This episode maps the making, breaking and redemption of CD Projekt Red’s 2020 game, starting with Mike Pondsmith’s 1980s tabletop lore, the alternate history behind Night City, and the design choices that made the first-person perspective, life paths, Brain Dance and Johnny Silverhand’s biochip central to the experience.

It then examines how review embargoes and PC-only review codes hid the state of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions, the investor class-action suits that settled for about $1.85 million, the Polish consumer-protection investigation, and the cultural debates over crunch, representation and censorship. The final act covers the years of patches, the Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners that brought players back, Patch 2.0 and Phantom Liberty, the Steam turnaround to overwhelmingly positive reviews, 40 million copies sold, and the decision to move the sequel to Unreal Engine 5.

• How Night City’s Trauma Team, MaxTac and cyberpsychos grew out of Pondsmith’s tabletop universe
• Why the studio abandoned The Witcher’s third-person camera for a first-person view
• How old console hard drives and a promised day-one patch led to a delisting and lawsuits
• The role of Edgerunners, Patch 2.0 and Phantom Liberty in the game’s recovery
• What the shift away from a proprietary engine says about the lessons CD Projekt took from the launch