Highlights
- Fans have noticed potential cameos of Idris Elba's character, Solomon Reed, in the base game of Cyberpunk 2077.
- Some players have spotted an NPC resembling Reed working as a bouncer in a Night City club, and another claims to have seen him at a bar named 'Malted Iguana Liquors.'
- These potential cameos could be intentional, but they could also be a coincidence.
Idris Elba’s Solomon Reed is one of the main characters of Cyberpunk 2077’s new Phantom Liberty DLC, but some eagle-eyed players think that he can be spotted in the base game as well. When CD Projekt Red released the second trailer for Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty during last year’s Game Awards 2022 livestream, fans were surprised to see the digital likeness of Hollywood megastar Idris Elba join Keanu Reeves as the mysterious and grizzled FIA agent Reed, and there has been much speculation about his character ahead of Phantom Liberty’s launch earlier this week.
V meets Solomon Reed while investigating a shuttle crash in Night City’s infamous Dogtown district, and it isn’t entirely clear if the cynical agent can be trusted. Though Reed may appear to be an entirely new character created for the Phantom Liberty DLC at first glance, diehard players will notice that the FIA organization he works for was actually mentioned in a digital booklet packaged with the highly successful Steam version of Cyberpunk 2077. There, it was implied that the FIA has agents undercover throughout Night City - and some fans think that Reed was among them before his first encounter with V.
A Reddit user by the handle of Siddharth_9697 recently noticed an NPC with a strong resemblance to Solomon Reed in the base Cyberpunk 2077, apparently working as a bouncer in one of Night City’s many clubs. In addition to being a dead-ringer for Idris Elba, this seemingly random NPC appears to have the same cyberware implants as Reed, and some of the commenters in Siddharth_9697’s post on r/cyberpunkgame point out that Reed mentions moonlighting as a bouncer when he isn’t carrying out clandestine missions for the New United States government.
This isn’t Solomon Reed’s only apparent cameo in the base Cyberpunk 2077, as another player claims to have spotted him at a bar named 'Malted Iguana Liquors' - though he can only be seen at a certain point in the game. The references to Phantom Liberty don’t stop with Reed either, as yet another player thinks that they encountered Songbird, the netrunner who leads V to Dogtown, lounging around in Empathy - the bar that Johnny Silverhand and his band Samurai would often play at before his death.
It isn’t clear if these cameos are intentional, but seeing Solomon Reed and Songbird in Night City before their starring roles in Phantom Liberty could help strengthen the connection between the DLC and the baseline Cyberpunk 2077. In the case of Reed, perhaps CD Projekt Reed modeled a random NPC after Idris Elba, only to retroactively link said character to Reed when the famous actor was cast in Phantom Liberty. If that is the case, then it’s a clever way of establishing Reed’s role in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe even before players start Phantom Liberty’s main story campaign.
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is available for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.
Source: GamesRadar
