Cyberpunk, the influential tabletop role-playing game released by Mike Pondsmith in 1988, has an all-too-familiar premise. In the game’s alternate timeline, global war has left the planet in tatters. People fend for themselves using futuristic weapons and cybernetic implants, with many eking out a living as outlaws and mercenaries. Megacorporations hold the power—any remaining governments skew authoritarian. The classic post-apocalyptic tropes are all there, but Pondsmith fleshed out his rain-soaked, neon-lit universe with “rockerboys,” a movement of musicians-turned-revolutionaries led by Johnny Silverhand of the fictional band Samurai. The game designer used the social cachet of music to craft an alternative cultural history, giving his dystopia greater richness.
Cyberpunk 2077, the long-awaited adaptation of Pondsmith’s creation from Polish video-game studio CD Projekt Red, similarly makes music an integral part of its world-building. You can hardly walk around 2077’s Night City—a post-apocalyptic vision of a West Coast metropolis—without hearing some corporate jingle rattling from a storefront or a sidewalk busker wailing on a futuristic guitar. Transmitted via fictional radio stations, the official soundtrack includes both licensed music and commissioned tracks from the likes of Run the Jewels, SOPHIE, and Grimes, who also voiced the in-game pop star Lizzy Wizzy. (However, the best musical surprises here—like Let’s Eat Grandma member Rosa Walton’s ebullient solo track “I Really Want to Stay at Your House” or the Deadly Hunta and Maro Music collaboration “When It’s War”—often come from less famous artists.) Even Samurai made it into Cyberpunk 2077, with music recorded by Swedish punks Refused and Silverhand’s holographic ghost portrayed by one Keanu Reeves.
The game also features a massive score that clearly channels some of the brashest electronic music of the 1990s. Aiming to echo 2077’s gritty aesthetic, music director Marcin Przybyłowicz and composers P.T. Adamczyk and Paul Leonard-Morgan consciously avoided the ’80s-inspired microgenres sometimes associated with the broader sci-fi genre of cyberpunk (synthwave, outrun). “We wanted to draw from industrial, IDM, techno, genres that are not necessarily ‘score-friendly,’” Adamczyk tells me. “We took musical devices from those genres and mangled them, mashing them with other styles to create narrative structure from them.” They also invited Nine Inch Nails drummer Ilan Rubin out to Poland for a recording session, in the hopes of injecting “a vague touch of humanity” to the sonic landscape, says Leonard-Morgan. They would eventually chop and process his breaks to fit the final score. “If I’m being entirely honest, my gaming days ended at the first PlayStation,” adds Rubin. “So it’s been cool to realize what an expansive, collaborative project this is.”
Przybyłowicz, who previously composed for CD Projekt Red’s blockbuster series The Witcher, also oversaw the curation of 2077’s soundtrack. The radio stations that pipe music into the world hearken back to Grand Theft Auto’s diegetic programming, though the inclusion of boomboxes and other speakers throughout Night City means that your car isn’t the only place you’ll experience the soundtrack. Certain selections, like a song from Toronto metal band Tomb Mold, correspond to specific in-game factions. “One of the groups living in Night City, the Maelstrom Gang, are all about body augmentations and closing the gap between man and machine, so we figured there’s no better genre for that than black metal,” says Przybyłowicz.
The developers were so seemingly dedicated to not breaking immersion that they initially assigned fictional identities to the artists appearing on the in-game radio stations. In pre-release announcements, Tomb Mold became Bacillus, SOPHIE and Shygirl were billed as Clockwork Venus, and Run the Jewels took on their conceptual RTJ4 persona of Yankee and the Brave. But there’s currently no way to see which song or artist (pseudonym or otherwise) is playing on a station. It’s a clear oversight in a game where the soundtrack greatly enriches the setting, and just one piece of evidence that 2077 was shipped out before it was ready for release.
Yankee and the Brave’s contribution, “No Save Point,” can be heard on 101.0 The Dirge, an eclectic rap station that also includes A$AP Rocky and South African rapper Yugen Blakrok. Run the Jewels’ first real foray into video game music was a perfect fit for El-P, an avowed Blade Runner fan. “They just said, ‘Do what you feel,’ which I loved,” he says. “I think they knew I was suited for the gig production-wise, and that Mike and I were pretty good at inhabiting a mood and character when we wrote.”
The most memorable sci-fi stories serve up effective metaphors for real-world issues, but Killer Mike doesn’t have to reach very far: “I used to pray to God, but I think he took a vacation/’Cause now the state of Cali is ran by these corporations,” he raps in the second verse. “No Save Point” is supposed to speak to the dystopian world of the game, but it premiered just days after Uber and Lyft scored a massive victory with the passage of Proposition 22 in California. (The labor law allows the rideshare companies to permanently categorize their drivers as “independent contractors,” a move opposed by labor leaders and Bernie Sanders.) Instead of the fictional bands that ground Pondsmith’s original storytelling, now real artists draw the parallels between his dire vision and our increasingly nerve-rattling reality. “I always consider the power of corporations,” Killer Mike tells me. “I always believe that the corporation will try and take advantage of the people, whether it’s Rockefeller or Mark Zuckerberg.”
Cyberpunk 2077 fans ran into some corporate hurdles of their own last week, upon the game’s release. The developers wisely realized ahead of time that the in-game radio stations would pose a copyright problem for streamers broadcasting on platforms like Twitch, so they included an optional “Disable Copyrighted Music” setting. In theory, this does away with any music not specifically commissioned for the game, such as the jazz standards heard on 91.9 Royal Blue Radio. But hours after 2077 came out, CD Projekt Red tweeted that they had “discovered” a song in the game that could possibly trigger automated DMCA strikes against offending channels, even with “Disable Copyrighted Music” enabled. By the next day, the company was officially advising streamers to mute the game’s music altogether, doing away with hundreds of original songs in an instant. (The soundtrack issue was one of many bug fixes addressed in a patch released on December 11.) The incident proved an unintentional condemnation of the Amazon-owned Twitch, which in recent months has come under fire and even publicly apologized for its historic mishandling of music licensing.
Pondsmith himself said earlier this year that Cyberpunk was written “as a warning, not an aspiration”—a not-so-subtle parable about “the worst of corporate excess.” On all counts, the score and soundtrack to Cyberpunk 2077 provide a perfect adrenaline rush for the visually captivating game. What’s regrettable are the small reminders that for all the emphasis placed on world-building through music, tasteful curation can only distract so much from encroaching realities.
