CD Projekt Red shows Cyberpunk 2077 motorcycle similar to Kaneda's from Akira

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Check this out: in July 2019, CD Projekt Red released an image of a Cyberpunk 2077 motorcycle, and the crowd connected the dots right away. The look strongly recalled the red bike of Kaneda, the protagonist of Akira, the Japanese manga and animated film that is mandatory reference for any cyberpunk story. The comparison wasn’t a stretch: the final game does have an Akira-style motorcycle riding around Night City, plus a car inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road.

The hype around Cyberpunk 2077 was sky-high that month. Shortly before, at Microsoft’s E3 2019 conference, Keanu Reeves took the stage to reveal he was giving voice and face to a character in the game, the rocker Johnny Silverhand. When he appeared, a fan shouted “You’re breathtaking!”, and Keanu pointed back at the audience and answered “You’re breathtaking! You’re all breathtaking!”. The line became a meme on the spot, and it was at that same E3 that CD Projekt announced the release date: April 16, 2020.

For those who just dropped in: Cyberpunk 2077 is the open-world RPG from the same company as The Witcher 3, based on Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk tabletop RPG. The player lives as V, a mercenary in Night City, a dystopian metropolis in California where cars, motorcycles and buildings follow visual styles well defined by the art team.

What came next

The April 2020 date didn’t hold: the game was delayed to September 17, then November 19 and, finally, came out on December 10, 2020. The launch was turbulent, with so many problems on older consoles that Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store from December 2020 to June 2021. Updates, the Phantom Liberty expansion (2023) and the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners (2022) turned things around for the game, which passed 40 million copies sold by July 2026.