Cyberpunk 2077 and a story about the city

Cyberpunk 2077 has a rather complicated relationship with the Canon of its own universe. The original tabletop role-playing game has three editions-and the last of them was unanimously excommunicated by fans from the Canon. In addition, Cyberpunk Red is now being prepared for release (the starter kit was released in the summer) — a full-fledged new edition designed to create a bridge between the old editions and the video game.

Cyberpunk 2077 and a story about the city


From the announcement to the release of Cyberpunk 2077, almost ten years have passed. But despite years of development and several transfers, CD Projekt Red has somehow kept the key features of the story and the universe secret. Even the night City Wire video series has shed light on only a few details — many still have a bad idea of what night city is and how it differs from dozens of other neon-cyberpunk anthills.
And it differs in an incredibly eventful history, about which trailers and YouTube videos did not really tell anything. To correct this omission, we have compiled a brief history of night city: in this text, we will tell you when and why this city appeared, how it was on the verge of destruction several times, and what Keanu Reeves has to do with it.

The events of Cyberpunk unfold in an alternate universe, which until the early nineties almost did not differ from our own. The starting point is just possible to take the years 1989-1990: at this time, power in the United States was secretly seized by the "Union of four" - the FBI, the CIA, the national security Council and the drug enforcement Administration (DEA). The coup effectively destroyed democracy, and the President was now only a puppet. Once in power, the new government immediately launched a series of interventions in Central America-similar to the Vietnam war (history, as always, teaches no one anything). These conflicts served as a good platform for field testing of the first battalions of augmented soldiers. And the thousands of ordinary conscripts who returned home crippled gave an even greater boost to the development
of the cybernetic prosthesis industry.

The next few years were relatively quiet. The cold war gradually came to an end, and the USSR began to cooperate closely with Europe. France, Italy, great Britain and a United Germany created the European economic community and switched to a single currency — the Eurodollar. Together, they built the world's first electromagnetic catapult to deliver cargo to orbit in the Canary Islands. The United States refused membership in the community: The Union of four continued its policy of "paranoid isolationism" - no matter that the Soviet Union had long since renounced communism.
However, the United States has seriously overestimated its position in the world. Although the government did everything to undermine the growing power of the European community, the superpower was rapidly losing prestige. In 1992, Colombian drug lords detonated a mini-nuclear warhead in new York, killing 15,000 people, in response to the actions of the DEA, which developed a special virus that destroyed more than 90% of Coca and poppy plantations around the world. And soon the United States was caught red-handed in financial manipulation, causing the world currency exchange to collapse like a house of cards. By 1996, the United States was catastrophically weakened by European community sanctions: so much so that the governments of many cities collapsed and declared themselves bankrupt.
The events of that year (and everything that led up to them) have been dubbed the " collapse of the United States." At the height of the Collapse, the crime rate soared so high that "Robocop" seems like a children's cartoon in comparison. People lynched criminal lawyers EN masse who were just doing their job, one in four Americans was left homeless, and bloody riots broke out across the country. The most desperate victims of the actions of the "Union of four" got together in groups of nomads, as in "Mad Max", and dispersed across the country, ruining everything in their path. And, even worse, there were the first gangs of "boosters" - augmented from head to toe punks, sowing chaos and destruction. And when the President and Vice President were killed on the same day, the interim US government had no choice but to suspend the Constitution and impose martial law.