The star’s unexpected cameo in CD Projekt Red’s game and onstage at E3 is much more than a cameo, it turns out – he’s actually a major NPC with a “huge role”, according to the studio.
Reeves is Johnny Silverhand, a character from Mike Pondsmith’s original paperware Cyberpunk RPG, and an ex-celebrity-turned-anti-corporate-anarchist… who’s now dead. And also not dead, kind of. If you skip the trailer to about 03:45, you’ll see him glitch out for a moment. Because he’s a ghost. But this is the future, so he’s, like, a digital ghost. Whoa.
“Keanu’s Johnny actually has a huge role in our game,” mission director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz tells Game Informer. “This is like a supporting protagonist. He is present throughout most of the game.”
Which more or less also confirms that he won’t be a romance prospect, but I think I’ve seen that episode of Black Mirror and it probably wouldn’t work out, anyway.
Cyberpunk 2077 launches on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on 16 April 2020.