Gamers who shoved Elon Musk into a garbage can in Cyberpunk 2077 may have done so at the billionaire’s behest. That’s according to a brief portion of Walter Isaacson’s recent Musk biography which described Musk charging his way into a voice recording session during the game’s development and demanding a cameo.
The odd encounter reportedly occurred while the artist Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children, was recording her voiceover for a character in the game. Grimes claims Musk showed up to the studio holding a “two-hundred-year-old” gun and demanded to be included. The billionaire claims he told the developers he was “armed but not dangerous.”
“The studio guys were sweating,” Grimes told Isaacson. Eventually, they agreed, she said.
That insistence by Musk may have led to a side quest where the main protagonist accepts a job from famous singer cyborg Lizzy Wizzy, voiced by Grimes, to surveil her boyfriend, who she believes may be cheating on her. The boyfriend, in the story, is also Wizzy’s manager.
“Imagine this — we’re never alone, not really. Always surrounded by assistants, PR reps, makeup artists,” Wizzy says during the quest. “I stop smiling at him for one millisecond, it’ll be all over every screamsheet in this town…Millions of eyes, trained on you, constantly.”
Players who accept the job sneak into a nightclub and hack a camera to eavesdrop on a conversation between the boyfriend and an unknown woman. The player learns that the boyfriend isn’t cheating, but instead has plans to backup a digital version of Wizzy’s consciousness in case her career ends earlier than expected. Awkwardly, the boyfriends ask if he can modify Wizzy’s digital consciousness to remove “undesirable traits.”
If the player decides to hand over a recording of the conversation to Wizzy, she decides to find and murder her boyfriend, unbeknownst to the player. Wizzy then calls back several days later asking the player to meet her at a hotel where they discover the boyfriend’s battered body. When prodded, she claims she didn’t mean to kill the man but was overcome with rage.
“You ever wake up in the middle of the night…and not know who you were for a second,” Wizzy asks. “Or, I mean…you ever feel like you weren’t really you?” The player is then instructed to grab the murdered Musk character and dump him down a trash chute. CD Project Red, Cyberpunk 2077’s developer, did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment
Isaacson, in his book, claims the cybernetic implants frequently used in the game were a “sci-fi version” of the type of brain computer interfaces Musk developing at his company Neuralink. Players in the game can use the cybernetics to hack into computers and weapons, see through walls, and scan the environment for information. Prolonged use of the devices, in the lore also lead to a condition called “cyberpsychosis” where users are driven to violent madness. Musk’s Neuralink has successfully helped a monkey play Pong.