There is a moment, often unremarked and rarely named, when a work of fiction stops behaving like a product and begins to behave like a place. This transition does not coincide neatly with release dates, sales figures, or even critical reassessment, nor does it arrive with the satisfaction of completion or closure. Instead, it tends to occur sometime later, after the credits have rolled, after the hardware has been powered down, when the player realizes—sometimes with mild surprise—that something has not ended at all. What has ended is merely the formal interaction. What remains has relocated.
Night City has crossed that threshold.
This is not, to be clear from the outset, an argument about the legality of intellectual property, nor is it a challenge to CD Projekt Red’s right to profit from Cyberpunk 2077 as a game. The studio undertook an ambitious and costly project, navigated a deeply troubled development cycle, delivered a work of unusual scope and density, and continues to derive revenue from it. That is all as it should be. The artists, engineers, writers, designers, and producers who brought Night City into being deserve not only financial compensation but cultural recognition for having attempted something that very few studios would dare to attempt at that scale.
What follows is not a claim about ownership in the legal sense. It is a claim about where Night City now exists, and about the growing mismatch between how institutions understand fictional environments and how those environments are actually lived, remembered, and sustained once they have been sufficiently internalized by their audience.
Night City no longer exists primarily on PCs, consoles, or cloud servers, nor does it meaningfully reside in compiled binaries, proprietary engines, or patch histories. Those are delivery mechanisms, not locations. Night City now exists in the nervous systems of millions of people who can traverse its districts, anticipate its transitions, recall its atmospheres, and summon its emotional textures without the aid of a screen. It exists as a mental environment that can be entered voluntarily or involuntarily, revisited without loading screens, and shared through language, gesture, and reference with a degree of precision that far exceeds what most “virtual worlds” ever achieve.
At that point, something fundamental has changed. The city has ceased to be merely software and has become something closer to a cognitive prosthesis: an auxiliary spatial framework embedded in memory, emotion, and imagination, capable of being activated long after direct interaction has ended. This is not metaphorical flourish; it is a description of how humans actually process and retain spaces that matter to them.
This phenomenon is not unique to Night City, but Night City exhibits it in an unusually compressed and intense form. Many fictional environments have achieved recognizability, nostalgia, even affection, but relatively few combine spatial density, visual specificity, narrative implication, ambient sound design, and emotional resonance in a way that produces such persistent aftereffects. Night City does not simply impress while one is actively playing; it continues to intrude, quietly but insistently, into idle moments afterward. It resurfaces during walks, commutes, bouts of insomnia, moments of melancholy, and periods of introspection, not as a sequence of remembered missions but as an inhabited atmosphere.
This is the crucial distinction. Players do not primarily remember what they did in Night City. They remember what it felt like to be there.
An experienced player can, without conscious effort, imagine taking a walk through Kabuki, starting at a familiar corner, passing stalls and vendors whose exact inventories no longer matter but whose rhythms and soundscapes remain intact, cutting through alleys that carry a particular sense of spatial compression and social tension, and drifting toward residential blocks where the city briefly exhales. The imagined walk unfolds with internal coherence. The succession of scenes feels plausible, even inevitable, in much the same way that a walk through one’s actual neighborhood does. One does not recall every detail; one recalls the logic.
That is not how levels behave. That is how places behave.
Once a fictional environment reaches this stage, its relationship to authorship changes in ways that our current intellectual property frameworks are poorly equipped to acknowledge. If Cyberpunk 2077 were to disappear tomorrow—if every executable were wiped, every server shut down, every official copy rendered inaccessible—Night City would not vanish. It would be reconstructed almost immediately, collaboratively and organically, through art, writing, tabletop adaptations, conversations, mods, and shared recollections. The fidelity of that reconstruction would be striking, not because people remember every texture or asset, but because the underlying spatial and emotional grammar of the city has already been internalized.
At that stage, the original medium becomes incidental. The city has escaped its container.
What complicates this further, and what is rarely discussed in any formal sense, is the sheer volume of emotional labor that has occurred inside Night City since its release. This labor was neither planned for nor accounted for, yet it constitutes a significant portion of what the city now is. The creators supplied the scaffolding, but the inhabitants supplied the weight. Players did not merely complete objectives or optimize builds; they brought grief, loneliness, depression, identification, nostalgia, and unresolved personal narratives into the environment, often using it as a space in which to process experiences that had little to do with the game’s explicit mechanics.
This was not “engagement” in the analytics sense. It was habitation.
At sufficient scale, habitation transforms a designed environment into something closer to a shared mental commons. This does not negate the original creative labor, which remains foundational and deserving of reward, but it does alter the balance of cultural contribution. At a certain point, the cumulative emotional investment of millions of inhabitants begins to outweigh the originating act in terms of lived reality. The city becomes something people have worked on internally, regardless of whether that work is formally recognized.
This is where many discussions falter, because the available conceptual tools tend to collapse the distinction between creation and use, as though the latter were passive. In reality, sustained inhabitation is itself a form of creative labor, albeit one that operates on an individual and collective psychological level rather than through formal production. Night City is now partially composed of what people have brought into it, not just what was put there.
This is also why simplistic continuations or appropriations of Night City tend to fail conceptually. Turning it into a hollow social sandbox where avatars idle, music plays, and chat windows scroll endlessly would strip it of the very qualities that made it persist. Reducing it to an endless combat arena driven by optimization loops and competitive churn would do the same. These approaches misunderstand the source of the city’s gravity, mistaking activity for vitality and novelty for meaning.
Night City’s power lies not in constant stimulation but in continuity, in the sense that life goes on whether or not the player is central to events. It feels inhabited because it does not revolve around the player in obvious ways, and it lingers because it permits stillness, repetition, and uneventfulness alongside spectacle.
A more coherent extension of Night City would therefore begin from a deceptively simple premise: that V is gone. Regardless of which canonical ending one prefers, V’s story concludes in some form. The narrative NPCs largely withdraw from active availability, not because they are erased or retconned, but because lives move on. Some figures remain as distant presences or rumors, others disappear entirely, and the city continues in a state of unresolved tension that reflects how political, corporate, and social realities actually evolve. The important point is not narrative closure but narrative absence.
In such a model, Night City would operate continuously rather than episodically, not as a “live service” in the contemporary sense of relentless engagement and monetization, but as an environment that changes incrementally over time. New spaces would open gradually rather than all at once. Megabuildings would reveal additional layers over months rather than being instantly accessible. Infrastructure would densify. Neighborhoods would evolve. Doors would open into tunnels and service corridors. Atriums would appear where none existed before. Elevators would gain destinations. None of this would require spectacle. The emphasis would be on sustained plausibility rather than infinite novelty.
Technically, there is nothing fantastical about such an undertaking. Reverse-engineering Night City into a modern, extensible engine such as Unreal is a large but tractable engineering and content problem, and the pool of people capable of contributing meaningfully to such a project already exists in abundance. Tens of thousands of artists, programmers, designers, and writers are already producing derivative work of remarkable quality, often in isolation and without coordination. The primary obstacles are not technical but institutional and conceptual.
The engine itself is almost beside the point. Unreal functions here as a symbol rather than a prescription. It represents portability, extensibility, and the acknowledgment that Night City is no longer a sealed artifact but an evolving place. It represents a willingness to accept that preservation sometimes requires transformation, and that cultural longevity is better served by stewardship than by control. The greatest risk to Night City is not change but stagnation, not dilution but entombment.
The resistance to such an approach is understandable, even predictable. Intellectual property regimes are not designed to handle environments that have become cognitively inhabited, and corporate structures are poorly suited to recognizing when a creation has outgrown its original custodians. Legal departments exist to minimize exposure, not to facilitate cultural transition, and the fear of precedent looms large over any discussion of shared ownership or commons-based stewardship.
Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that when a work embeds itself deeply enough into collective consciousness, attempts to exert total control over its derivatives become increasingly untenable, regardless of legal enforceability. Cultural reality has a way of outrunning institutional frameworks, leaving them scrambling to reassert relevance after the fact.
A useful analogy, though an imperfect one, is the hypothetical return of Tolkien in the present day and his attempt to assert absolute authority over all derivative uses of Middle-earth. While such control might be legally defensible, it would feel culturally invasive, even abusive, because the world he created has long since become a shared mental space shaped by generations of readers, scholars, artists, and storytellers. Middle-earth no longer belongs exclusively to its author because it no longer exists exclusively in his imagination.
Night City is not Middle-earth, but the underlying mechanism is the same. Creation, when it succeeds, escapes. It migrates into other minds, where it is maintained, altered, and sustained through use rather than authorship. Attempts to fully police that migration misunderstand what creation actually does once it works.
What makes this process unavoidable is the simple experiential fact that Night City now evokes genuine emotion independent of gameplay. Walking through it, even in memory, produces a sense of connection that is neither ironic nor easily dismissed. It is an ethically repellent city by most standards—violent, exploitative, stratified, and cruel—and no reasonable person would choose to live there in reality. And yet, filtered through the perspective of a 2077 inhabitant, buffered by narrative distance, and softened by the implicit assurance that one is only visiting, it can still generate a feeling that borders uncomfortably on belonging.
“This awful place is my city.”
That feeling is not rational, but it is real. It arises from prolonged exposure, from familiarity, from the quiet accumulation of moments rather than from dramatic events. Once a place can do that—once it can produce reluctant attachment, melancholy affection, and a sense of ownership that is emotional rather than legal—it has crossed a threshold that no terms of service can meaningfully reverse.
V, in this light, was never the true protagonist. V was a vector, a lens through which the city revealed itself. The real subject was always Night City itself, with its layered histories, unresolved tensions, and ambient sadness. With V gone, the city does not collapse. It persists, sustained by the accumulated presence of those who have walked its streets long enough for them to feel familiar, even intimate.
This is not a call to infringement, nor is it a manifesto demanding that corporations relinquish control overnight. It is not a demand at all. It is an observation about a process that has already occurred, regardless of whether it is acknowledged. Night City has become a shared mental environment, a commons in everything but law, maintained through collective memory, emotional investment, and ongoing reinterpretation long after the original medium has ceased to be central.
The only remaining question is whether anyone involved is willing to recognize this reality and act accordingly, or whether Night City will be left suspended in a kind of institutional limbo, legally owned yet culturally autonomous, preserved but not stewarded, remembered but not allowed to live.
V is dead.
Night City, however, remains very much alive.