How Mike Pondsmith Teamed Up With CD Projekt Red to Make Cyberpunk 2077
Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020, has been working with CD Projekt Red for years helping with Cyberpunk 2077. Recently, Pondsmith spoke to fans at PAX West, where he recounted how he first got started with the Polish studio. Apparently, CD Projekt Red wasn’t remotely what he was expecting.
How the Cyberpunk 2020 Creator Met CD Projekt Red
Pondsmith first released Cyberpunk 2020, the RPG which Cyberpunk 2077 is based on, in 1988. At his talk at PAX West, as reported by VG24/7, Pondsmith went all the way back to that period to tell the tale of how he ended up working with CD Projekt Red. “Jump back to the 90s,” he says; “and we’d written Cyberpunk. We’d licensed it to a lot of companies and this one company wants to license Cyberpunk in Polish. Remember, the iron curtain is still up, this is Solidarity beginning to get popular. I remember looking over at my business manager who’s also my wife, saying, ‘it’ll sell about five copies.’ I think we sold those five copies to guys who are part of CD Projekt Red. They were teenagers and college guys and as one of them told me years later, ‘We had communism and we had Cyberpunk.'”
CD Projekt Red first contacted Mike Pondsmith some years ago, following the release of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. The studio was interested in creating a Cyberpunk game. Pondsmith was working with Microsoft at the time. As part of his role at the company, he had spent time in various former Soviet countries, visiting fledgling development companies in the region. As such, Pondsmith had become accustomed to seeing small companies with outdated technology. CD Projekt Red, however, was not what he expected; “I imagined ten guys crammed in a room with antiquated computers and a goat,” he says; “I’d actually gone to studios like that. And then they sent us a copy of The Witcher 2 and we said, ‘Well, this is really good. That goat can really program!'”
“So,” he continues; “I go to Poland and wow, these guys have a studio better than the ones I’ve worked with at Microsoft. I’m going, ‘These guys have their shit together.’ … I walked in on my first day in the studio and they know more about this than I probably remember. They knew it, they loved it. They had the capability”. Pondsmith agreed to license the game to CD Projekt Red shortly thereafter. Apparently, several companies have optioned the franchise in the past, but none were able to make it work. “Cyberpunk has been an option since the 1990s,” says Pondsmith; “to be a video game that [developers] either technically couldn’t do or in a couple of cases had said, ‘We’ll just reskin this thing and we’ll call it Cyberpunk.’ And my response was always, ‘Oh yeah, that’s not gonna work.’ We felt incredibly lucky [to work with CD Projekt Red].”