Cyberpunk 2077 email from “Johnny Silverhand” has players in stitches

Cyberpunk 2077’s futuristic setting has a fantastical bent, but it seems its inhabitants aren’t immune from some of our mundane troubles. A spam email in-game from “Johnny Silverhand” is remarkably similar to some real ones.

Cyberpunk 2077 has some new additions thanks to the 2.0 update and Phantom Liberty DLC. Changes to perks and the addition of new progression systems like Relic Skills are just some of them.

Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty DLC obviously adds a whole host of new characters and a new story to the game but there’s more than that. The 2.0 update also added new dialogue to the base game, including new texts and emails on V’s phone.

One of these new messages has Cyberpunk 2077 players of the game’s Subreddit sides split thanks to its fantastic satirization of modern spam. u/Amirax posted a message they’d received in-game that they joked was “proof” that Johnny Silverhand was alive.

The message claims to be from the legendary Rockerboy and terrorist whose digital soul is currently eating the player character’s brain. The message is a very obvious spoof on spam texts and emails that the tech-literate will immediately get. Your grandparents might comply though.

It’s riddled with the sort of grammatical errors that are common amongst these sorts of messages. “Hello dear user, This is Johnny Silverhand. I am write for you in hiding – not dead!” the message begins.

It goes on to explain that apparently our headmate never died and has been healing from radiation sickness for the last 50 years. Users in the comments of the post found it hilarious.

“The spam emails in this game are top-notch,” one user said. “Even in 2077, we have scammers that try the “King of Nigeria” email route,” another replied. More than the classic scams of the early 2000’s this one has a lot in common with messages that sprung up after the death of another monarch.

Some users also think that u/Amirax’s initial joke isn’t super far off the mark. “You joke, but canonically speaking this might actually be true,” one user explained. “The upper half of his body that was left after Smasher blew the rest of it is frozen in Angel’s basement.”

Could a corporeal Johnny Silverhand make a return in a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel? Mike Pondsmith had previously claimed to have left Silverhand’s death ambiguous for the benefit of tabletop GMs who wanted to include him in their games. Maybe the virtual GMs at CD Projekt RED will take the hint.