Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most exciting upcoming releases of 2020, but if you can’t wait till April next year, there’s always Cyberprank 2069 to play in the meantime. Or at least, there was.
For reasons that I’m going to assume are fairly obvious, Cyberprank 2069, which formally boasted the even ballsier name of Cyberpunk 2069, was very recently pulled from Steam. This is actually kind of a shame, given that it looked absolutely awful in the best possible way.
Yes, my guilty pleasure is that I like to play crappy knockoff games. Don’t judge me, we all have our hangups.
The original Steam description (via PC Gamer) is as follows:
This is a new generation RPG game. True simulation of life in the world of the future. In 2069, people will be enslaved by a race of intelligent computers. Now it is cyberghetto. The main character is a cop from the past. His task is to become the most wealthy resident of the city of the future.
While the name of the game alone would probably have been enough to attract the unwanted attention of Cyberpunk 2077 studio CD Projekt RED, it was an updated store description for Cyberprank 2069 that really seemed to be the final nail in the coffin.
As you can see in the image below, it thanked everybody for buying (what it claimed) to be a joke game, before promising that everyone who picked up Cyberprank 2069 would receive a free copy of Cyberpunk 2077 when it releases.
Obviously, that leaves us with the implication that people were being bribed to buy the game as they’d be rewarded with a free copy of Cyberpunk 2077. That in itself is against Steam’s terms, but the product description went on to encourage “funny” reviews of the game, with the best one winning a collector’s edition of Cyberpunk – another no-no for Steam.
If you actually picked up a copy of Cyberprank 2069 assuming you’re going to receive Cyberpunk 2077 as a Christmas present, I’d like to point out that one; it’s massively likely that’s not going to happen, and two; even if they do honour their word, you won’t be getting it till Christmas 2020, given Cyberpunk 2077 comes out months after Christmas 2019.
Keanu Reeves wouldn’t find any of this very breathtaking at all.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.