Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 adds Doom-like minigame starring Johnny Silverhand

Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 launched last week, and fans have been poring over newly added content to find all the Easter eggs CD Projekt Red has crammed in.

One of the latest discoveries is an arcade cabinet which lets you play a Doom and Wolfenstein inspired minigame called Arasaka Tower 3D. In it, you play as Johnny Silverhand descending the 120 floors of Arasaka Tower in 2023 after he stormed the building in a bomb attack on the corporation.

Complete with Keanu Reeves' face at the bottom of the screen, tight corridors and downsampled tracks from Cyberpunk 2077's OST, it's got 90s FPS written all over it. That's not all though, as players have also discovered it relates to the long-running FF:06:B5 Easter egg present in other CD Projekt Red games.

The arcade cabinet can be found near the Protein Farm fast travel point in the Badlands, in an abandoned church. One of the scores on the leaderboard for Arasaka Tower 3D is FF06B5 and was set by PLHSTR (Polyhistor, the owner of the arcade carbinet). Spoiler warning for the mystery of FF:06:B5 ahead, if you're looking to discover it for yourself!

This is where it gets wild. Waiting around in server room 971229 on floor 52 until the timer reaches 270 seconds will unlock a secret maze on floor -10. Within this map, eight QR codes can be found. A group of sleuths figured out the QR codes were actually parts of a larger image - a three by three square forming one massive QR code.

The group decided to run the partially completed QR code into a website which recovers data from QR codes, and discovered it contained a Python script to play noughts and crosses. After testing out different arrangements of the smaller codes, the group found a version which was "most" correct and, crucially, could be restored by up to 30 percent. This meant in theory, they could complete the bigger QR code.

However, the group realised they didn't need to find or create the missing piece of the QR code due to something called Reed-Solomon error corrections. These are algorithms which can be used to correct signals or recover data from transmissions. If you're thinking that sounds familiar, then cast your mind back to Idris Elba's character in Phantom Liberty. Solomon Reed. Yup, this is no coincidence.

Using the Reed-Solomon algorithm on the incomplete QR code gave the group a Python script for a game of noughts and crosses against an AI that's unwinnable.

There's still plenty of mysteries to solve for the FF:06:B5 community however. How exactly does an unwinnable game of noughts and crosses relate to everything? And who are the other names, ARMSMG and ANTVRK, on the leaderboard? What's with the laptop which presumably belongs to TyRos and shows a grid of pairs of letters - similar to the letters found in The Witcher 3?

As FF:06:B5's detectives continue to follow the trail and solve a little bit more of the puzzle, more questions appear. And it's fascinating to watch. Between this and the improvements made in Cyberpunk 2077 2.0, I'm extremely tempted to dive back in.

Cyberpunk 2077 is seeing another resurgence in player count with the 2.0 update and the release of Phantom Liberty. It had a peak of 246k concurrent players on Steam (via SteamDB) within the last 24 hours - before 2.0 released that peak number was somewhere around 20k. Its 24-hour peak count is more than double that of Starfield, which recorded 116k.