Keanu Reeves is Cyberpunk 2077 canon, it seems.
That’s Keanu Reeves the actor Johnny Silverhand, the character real-life Keanu Reeves plays in the upcoming CD Projekt game.
This all stems from the recent release of the music video for “No Save Point” by Yankee and the Brave, the fictional Cyberpunk group played by real-life American hip hop supergroup Run The Jewels. No Save Point is a song that’ll be heard in Cyberpunk 2077.
It’s all very Cyberpunk, as you’d expect, and pretty unremarkable apart from one lyric that has certainly set tongues wagging within the game’s lore community: “Keanu Reeves, cyber arm under my sleeve,” raps Killer Mike.
It’s just a music video for a song that’s in the game, but this is Cyberpunk and so lore is a serious business. Why would you hear a lyric about Keanu Reeves in the world of Cyberpunk?
That’s the question that sparked an explanation from Patrick K. Mills, Cyberpunk 2077 senior quest designer, who took to Twitter to confirm the Keanu Reeves lyric is “lore friendly”.
How so? Well, according to Mills, the lyric is an in-universe cultural reference to Keanu Reeves, “a little known Collapse-era actor who bore an uncanny resemblance to Johnny Silverhand”. In the Cyberpunk universe, Keanu Reeves was frequently mistaken for Johnny Silverhand in the years following Johnny’s disappearance.