Cyberpunk 2077 was a true gaming phenomenon - the kind of game that made players clear their schedules and incapable of talking about any other title for years. (We had a feeling that might happen from years before when we worked on the “Seize the Day” trailer featuring Keanu Reeves.) But Phantom Liberty, the massive DLC update which made the world of Night City bigger, richer, and even more alive, promised to take the franchise to an entirely new level. So CD Projekt Red asked us how they could make the launch of the expansion feel just as big as the game itself.
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When the base game came out, it was hugely popular and wildly successful - but it was also a divisive product for many players, especially those playing on sub-state-of-the-art hardware. So we knew that promoting Phantom Liberty needed a concept that worked on two levels. On the surface, we needed to highlight how the expansion deepened the aspects of the base game that everyone loved - the intoxicatingly fully-realized future-noir setting, the meaningful choices that players could make to decide how the drama would play out, the no-holding-back buy-in from big-name stars. But we also needed to communicate subtly yet clearly to fans who’d had a sub-optimal experience with the game in the past that CDPR had been listening. We needed to tell the world that the game was fixed.
Once we’d landed on this line, we wrote out a monologue that used “the game is fixed” as a central noirish metaphor and evoked our “Seize the Day” trailer in tonality and approach, allowing Idris Elba to assume the mantle of franchise figurehead from Keanu Reeves. We set the scene in a Night City bar, dropping our recognizable superstar in the middle of the unreal visuals of the game. And then we let Idris do his thing, teasing audiences with tantalizing language about rigged games, unfair hands, and going all in. All of this footage was captured, tracked, and matched in a manner which allowed us to work closely with CDPR to bridge the gap between the world of the film and the world of the spot. We handled all post, VFX, design, animation, and support for the spot, including flawlessly weaving game assets into the final footage. And because they trusted us to do the franchise justice, they let us pick & choose the gameplay footage to incorporate into the final edit for maximum impact.
Within a week of release, Phantom Liberty had sold over 3 million units - and by October of 2025, that number was up to 10 million. The trailer itself was widely celebrated, even taking home Best Video Game Trailer at the Golden Trailer Awards. But the biggest success metric was the overwhelming outpouring of support from players who praised Phantom Liberty as delivering on the full potential of the Cyberpunk 2077 project. The game, as it turns out, really was fixed.
