Remember when Johnny Silverhand’s girlfriend got kidnapped in Cyberpunk 2077? It should have been much scarier
If you’ve played Cyberpunk 2077, one of the scenes that may well have imprinted itself on your brain is the sequence that sees you get to take to the stage with Samurai as Johnny Silverhand way back before he got relic’d. One thing you might not know, however, is that the kidnapping scene that follows it was originally recorded to be a lot more harrowing.
If you need a bit of a recap now that we’re far enough out from the original Cyberpunk that work on its sequel has kicked off, one of the moments from Johnny’s past V gets to relive is his netrunner girlfriend, Alt Cunnigham, being kidnapped by Arasaka. It’s an important bit of development you need to see to try and understand why Keanu Reeves’ character arguably acts the way he does at times, and it seems CD Projekt’s original plan for driving that home was to make it a lot more emotional and harrowing.
Speaking during CDPR’s most recent REDstream, Alix Wilton Regan, Cunningham’s voice actress, singled out that scene as one of the most emotional bits of acting she had to do for the game, mentioning that only a bit of what was recorded ended up making it into the finished product. “We recorded a lot more violence as they were kidnapping Alt and taking her away, and we recorded a lot more fear and a lot more tears,” Regan recalled.
