Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel will let us take a detour from the returning Night City to visit a new location which feels a bit “like Chicago gone wrong”. Naturally, this news has me questioning how Cyberpunk’s timeline might have affected the most prominent basketball dynasty of the 1990s.
The tiny nugget of info we got about this second city comes from Mike Pondsmith, creator of the Cyberpunk TTRPG series that CD Projekt’s futuristic RPGs are based on. It’s the first bit of concrete info about the game – beyond just where it’s at in the production process – we’ve gotten for a while.
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Speaking to Tvgry during this year’s Digital Dragons Conference, Pondsmith touched on his current relationship with CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk devs. He’s “not as involved directly with the sequel as he was with the first Cyberpunk, but he does still pop by the studio to look at scripts and offer his views on stuff like new cyberware made for Project Orion.
For instance, he revealed that when he was there recently, he “spent a lot of time talking to one of the environment guys, and he was explaining how the new place in Orion – because there’s another city we visit, I’m not telling you any more than that, but there’s another city we visit.”
“Night City’s still there,” Pondsmith continued, telling us more, “I remember looking at it and going ‘yeah, I understand the feel that you’re going for in this, and this really does work – it doesn’t feel like Blade Runner, it feels more like Chicago gone wrong’. I said ‘yeah, you know, I can see this working.'”
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This chatter starts at around the three hour and 45 minute mark of the video embedded above, if you want to check it out for yourself. I don’t know if you’ll do the same, but the mention of a Cyberpunk city that might be a bit like Chicago got me wondering what the existing Cyberpunk lore says about the actual Windy City.
According to the series’ Fandom Wiki (which does note that it needs more citations), Chi-town was “left in a state of absolute devastation” by the collapse of the United States that occurs between 1996 and 2008 in the Cyberpunk timeline, and was subsequently ravaged by a “catastrophic bio-plague” created by the federal government itself. By 2077, the city’s “implied to have undergone some level of reconstruction” by rumours of it being connected to Night City via the transcontinental maglev rail network that Cyberpunk 2077’s database describes as “currently inoperational”, but subject to revitalisation efforts by Night Corp.
Cool. But here’s the thing. If Chicago started to fall apart in 1996 – the year that martial law was declared across the USA in Cyberpunk lore – do Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls win the 1996, 1997, and 1998 NBA championships to cement themselves as arguably the greatest basketball dynasty of all-time? That’s assuming Jordan and the Bulls even exist in the Cyberpunk universe, but I think it’s worth exploring anyway.
The situation is this as far as I can tell – the aforementioned martial law runs from 1996 to 1999, so Jordan and co have that to contend with, in addition to a 1998 midwest drought and the collapse doing so much damage that “an estimated 90%” of Chicago is abandoned by the end of it in 2008. It’s MJ though. I’m still banking on him to beat the Jazz in the finals, even if he’s got to dribble past bio-plagues and hostile cybernetically-augmented soldiers to do it.
Do you think his airness still ends up with six rings on his weird cyber-fingers? Also, how do you feel about visiting this second city in Cyberpunk 2? Let us know below!
