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 th ...