The Waiting

For two years before it came out, Cyberpunk 2077 was better than any game could be, because it didn’t exist yet. You had trailers, screenshots, developer interviews promising a revolution in open-world design, and what you really had was a projection based on The Witcher 3, which was probably the best open-world RPG ever made—vast, written like actual fiction, worth exploring because the world felt inhabited instead of designed.

Cyberpunk as a genre had been mostly visual wallpaper for decades. Neon and corporations and neural implants, looked great, meant nothing. What made this compelling was that CD Projekt Red would bring their writing sensibility to something with actual narrative weight, actual stakes. That a world of MegaCorps and street gangs and impossible choices might actually feel urgent instead of just pretty.

Keanu Reeves showed up as a digital ghost in the marketing, which should’ve been terrible but felt exactly right for a game about authenticity and fakeness being the same thing. It all lined up. The studio, the source material, the cultural moment, the casting. It felt possible that someone had finally understood how to make cyberpunk matter.

December 2020 arrived and the game was broken. Famously, legendarily broken in ways that took years to fix. But before that, before the launch exposed the gap between what we expected and what was actually there, it was just potential. For a moment it felt like someone got it. That feeling, that anticipation, was worth something even though it didn’t pan out.