They Really Didn’t Have to Go This Hard for the Cyberpunk 2077 Edition of the Commodore 64

William Gibson’s Neuromancer , the novel generally credited with creating the cyberpunk genre, was published in 1984. The work’s prescience is all the more remarkable given that computers at the time were nowhere near capable of creating the fully immersive virtual environments Gibson envisioned when he coined the term “cyberspace.”

The dominant microcomputer of the era was the Commodore 64, released in early 1982, on which those of your correspondent’s vintage whiled away many happy hours playing classics like Paradroid , Elite , Archon , and … Neuromancer , a hugely underappreciated game based on Gibson’s novel. That game probably deserves a post of its own, but the tl;dr is that it was “produced” by LSD evangelist Timothy Leary, who had the (possibly psychedelic-assisted) foresight to commission a game based on the book, and was developed by Interplay, the 1980s powerhouse that was responsible for Wasteland and the Bard’s Tale series and probably also deserves its own post.

Neuromancer the game was released in 1988, by which time Commodore’s time in the sun was coming to an end, but it was still released for the venerable C64, along with the Amiga—Commodore’s second and final groundbreaking machine—Apple II and IIGS, and MS-DOS. It wasn’t the only notable cyberpunk release of that year, either—1988 also was the first edition of a tabletop RPG that went by the name of Cyberpunk 2013. Subsequent editions would be branded Cyberpunk 2020 , Cyberpunk V3.0, and finally Cyberpunk Red— with the latter setting playing directly into the events of Cyberpunk 2077 .

There’s a reason for all this history: Commodore has just announced a brand collaboration with CD PROJEKT RED, the studio behind Cyberpunk 2077 . And look, brand crossovers are dime-a-dozen, and we’re not generally given to gushing over them, but… a reissued Commodore 64, rebranded as the Commodore 77? There’s both plenty of historical sense behind the idea—as we’ve just seen—but more to the point, the thing just looks awesome. I mean, come on, it even uses a Cyberpunk 2077-themed font for its BASIC interface.

Watch the Commodore 77 come to life, hand-painted by the artists at AK Studio in an exclusive collaboration with the Cyberpunk 2077 and @commodoreofcl teams.

Inspired by Cyberpunk 2077 and built on the legendary… pic.twitter.com/4e3bUjgfNb

It also goes like the proverbial bat out of hell in comparison to the original Commodore 64; that machine’s processor ran at a stately 1MHz, give or take (the NTSC and PAL versions had slightly different clock speeds), while the C77 rattles along at 77MHz via a low-power AMD chip. The BASIC screen also suggests that the original’s titular 64KB of RAM has been increased to 64MB.