Cyberpunk 2077 fans appreciated the concept of Johnny Silverhand through millennia, from a cave painting to "Star Wars"

The success of Cyberpunk 2077 was built on more than just Night City neon and Johnny Silverhand rock-and-roll terrorism. A lot of it came down to a near-universal rebellion formula, where the whole point is telling the people at the top to get lost. Someone decided to stress-test that idea by pulling the franchise out of 2077 and dropping it into other points in human history.

The result is a series of drawings where the century and the oppressive corporation change, but the slogan stays the same.

A Star Wars-flavored Cyberpunk moves the action to a galaxy far, far away, where the hero directs his complaints at sand. A 1177 version sends him off to fight the Sultanate.

The cave-painting version goes furthest back of all, landing on 200,000,077 BC. A Neanderthal Johnny points at a red-haired woman, with a caption noting that historians are still working out what the image actually means. A separate 5-micrometer scale bar shows the same scene at cellular level.

The Egyptian entry turned out to be the most historically grounded of the bunch. Fans identified the featureless, eyes-only figure as Medjed, a deity from the Book of the Dead documented in the Greenfield Papyrus from around the 10th century BC. Texts describe Medjed as a being hidden from sight who strikes enemies with beams from his eyes, which makes the laser-eyed drawing oddly fitting.

The 27 AD version also checks out on the dating front. Most accounts place the crucifixion around 30 AD, with a ministry lasting roughly three years, so the chosen year lines up with the start of that period.

A chunk of the discussion pointed out that half these eras line up with Assassin's Creed history. Origins covers Hellenistic Egypt, Odyssey covers 5th-century BC Greece, Black Flag covers the 18th-century Caribbean, and Shadows covers late-16th-century Japan. It's the eras that match up, not the specific years in the captions.

That naturally reignited the old wish for a cyberpunk Assassin's Creed. Someone brought up Watch Dogs: Legion, whose Bloodline expansion is built entirely around an assassin character and puts Ubisoft right at the edge of that same territory. The artist behind the collection goes by Doop, and the whole series pulled in more than 1,300 votes in a single day.