Netflix has thrown its own hat in the cyberpunk ring with, well, Cyberpunk itself. In 2022, Netflix dropped an anime show called Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which takes place about a year before the events of the video game Cyberpunk 2077. The game had been plagued by technical issues and class-action lawsuits, but the TV adaptation was universally acclaimed right off the bat — so much so that it eventually led to a reappraisal of the game.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Was A Nice Addition To The Video Game Franchise
TV adaptations of hit video game franchises have become pretty common in recent years, but they’ve been a mixed bag. Fallout is a great show that appeals to both long-time game fans and casual TV viewers, but Halo disregarded the source material entirely in favor of a generic military sci-fi show — the kind of thing someone who saw the cover of Halo might imagine the game itself to be.
HBO’s The Last of Us got off to a strong start with a near-flawless first season, but it went off a cliff as it began to adapt the wildly controversial sequel in season 2. Netflix quietly became one of the best places for these video game adaptations with a little show called Arcane.
Arcane has all the fan service that long-time League of Legends fans could ask for, but it’s also a self-contained TV masterpiece for non-gamers to enjoy. Arcane seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime show — a satisfying adaptation of a popular video game that serves fans and non-fans alike — but, a little under a year later, Netflix did it again.
Cyberpunk: Edgerunners has compelling characters, gorgeous animation, and intriguing worldbuilding that appeals to both devotees of the game (the few that there were at the time) and newcomers who just appreciate a good cyberpunk show. Edgerunners garnered a perfect 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes — an extreme rarity in the video game adaptation space — and it deserved every last one of those “fresh” reviews.
Edgerunners is actually an improvement over the game. The game had lofty ambitions, but it didn’t have the ingenuity to pull off its themes. Edgerunners tells the story that Cyberpunk 2077 set out to tell but couldn’t make work, and makes it work.
Edgerunners Arrived At The Perfect Time For Cyberpunk Fans
Edgerunners arrived at the perfect time to redeem the franchise. When Cyberpunk 2077 was first released in 2020, it was met with a mixed response. Critics had lauded the game’s graphics, storytelling, and worldbuilding, and everyone loved Keanu Reeves’ turn in the lead role as rockstar/terrorist Johnny Silverhand. But players were frustrated by all the bugs and glitches in the game.
It got so bad that Sony removed the game from the PlayStation Store for six months while the developers scrambled to fix these issues. By the time Cyberpunk: Edgerunners came out in 2022, the franchise was just starting to win over players (or, as the studio sees them, paying customers) following a rough start.
In the years since Cyberpunk 2077 launched, CD Projekt has issued a few improvements and updates that have mostly rectified the bugs. That, along with the Phantom Liberty expansion and the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime tie-in, gradually led to the game being reappraised. Sometimes, the TV spinoff “nobody asked for” is just what the franchise needs (see also: Andor).