I spoke with Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith at E3, who told me that CD Projekt Red definitely wasn’t the first video game company to try and license Cyberpunk from him.
“Since the day I did Cyberpunk, we’ve had people option it for video games.” Pondsmith said with a laugh. “I think we were up to six or seven, including a lot of fairly big titled names.” Pondsmith wouldn’t elaborate on who those companies were, but did explain why they ultimately went with CDPR.
“A lot of
were like ‘okay, we’re going to take this and we’re going to reskin it to whatever we’re currently doing, and we’re going to call it Cyberpunk.’ We’d walk out of the deal and go ‘yeah, I dunno, that didn’t feel good.’”
Source: IGN.com Cyberpunk Creator Says He Turned Down Half a Dozen Offers Before CD Projekt Red