Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000173 · Gaming → Video game launches → Catastrophic technical launches · 2020–2023
Cyberpunk 2077
Massive game that released broken and became a meme about overhype
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“Keanu Reeves told the crowd they were breathtaking. Eighteen months later Sony was handing out refunds.”
Why Noah kept it
Cyberpunk 2077 came out in December 2020 so broken on PS4 and Xbox One that Sony pulled it from its store for six months, and clips of its glitches filled every feed. Nothing in the Ark covers a big game launch going wrong, or the years of patches that won people back.
- In the Ark since
- 28 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.9 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 272.5 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077
What it is
Cyberpunk 2077 is a 2020 action RPG from CD Projekt Red that launched on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in such a broken state that Sony delisted it from the PlayStation Store. The game had widespread bugs and crashes, and the developer faced class-action lawsuits for downplaying the problems before release.
Why it’s internet culture
It became the defining example of a AAA game studio overpromising and under-delivering, sparking ongoing online arguments about whether games should launch unfinished and how long players should wait for patches to make them playable. The eventual reputation recovery through updates and DLC showed both how companies could walk back a disaster and how online discourse could shift when they did the work.
People shared clips of T-posing characters and floating cars from Cyberpunk 2077's 2020 launch, demanded refunds en masse and turned it into the standard joke about broken games. Years of patches later, many of the same people talked themselves into loving it.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2020 · CD Projekt Red (Poland), released on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Stadia · Also known as Cyberpunk; CP2077; Cyberbug 2077
- What it is
- Cyberpunk 2077 is a video game made by CD Projekt Red, a Polish studio, and released on 10 December 2020. The player explores a large future city called Night City, takes jobs and fights, with Keanu Reeves playing a dead rock star living inside the hero's head. It was sold for computers and for home consoles (game machines plugged into a television). On the older consoles, the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, it ran so badly at launch that it became the best-known broken game of its time.
- Where it came from
- CD Projekt announced it in 2012 and built years of anticipation with trailers. At the E3 games show in 2019, Keanu Reeves came on stage to reveal his part, and a fan shouting "You're breathtaking" at him became a joke of its own. The game was delayed three times in 2020. Within hours of release, players were posting short videos of glitches on Twitter, Reddit, YouTube and TikTok. About a week later Sony removed it from the PlayStation Store and offered refunds. It didn't return there until June 2021.
- Why it mattered
- It was one of the most anticipated games of its decade, from a studio that players trusted because of The Witcher 3 (2015). That trust is why the broken launch felt like a betrayal, and why it led to lawsuits from investors. It became the standard example of companies selling unfinished games and fixing them later with downloaded updates (patches). Then the fixes worked. Update 2.0, the Phantom Liberty expansion in 2023 and the 2022 Netflix anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners won many players back, so it also became a standard comeback story, alongside No Man's Sky.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People turned a broken product into shared entertainment, and the glitch clips spread further than the trailers had. The same crowd that mocked it at launch changed its mind after the patches and the anime, so online opinion about games was loud but could still be won back.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (2.0 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.4 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (52.3 KB)
- Original
- 272.5 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.9 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.5 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.4 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 4.73% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,480 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 2,080 |
History
Kept
“Cyberpunk 2077 came out in December 2020 so broken on PS4 and Xbox One that Sony pulled it from its store for six months, and clips of its glitches filled every feed. Nothing in the Ark covers a big game launch going wrong, or the years of patches that won people back.”