Netflix’s latest video game adaptation, Cyberpunk Edgerunners, has absolutely exploded on the streaming platform, almost instantly making its way into the top five.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners is an original anime set in the world of Cyberpunk 2077, and just days after debuting the show was already number five on Netflix’s list of most-watched. As noted by Radek Grabowski, Global PR director at CD Projekt Red, Edgerunners has a staggering 14,880,000 hours watched in its first week.
Equally impressive is the show’s Rotten Tomato score, which is currently sitting at 100 percent with twelve reviews, and an audience score of 97 percent with over 1200 ratings.
This makes Cyberpunk Edgerunners one of the highest-rated shows in Netflix’s history, not just in terms of anime or video game adaptations. For comparison’s sake, Castlevania, one of the best video game adaptations of all time, currently has a 94 critic score and an 89 audience score.
The success of Edgerunners has had even further-reaching effects, however, as it’s led to Cyberpunk 2077 seeing a massive resurgence in popularity. Since the release of Edgerunners, the game has seen over one million players almost every day, the highest player numbers the title has had since its launch in December 2020. It certainly shows the power adaptations have to bring players to the original source material.
If you’re unfamiliar with Cyberpunk Edgerunners, the anime takes place one year before the events of the game, and tells an original story with new characters. Here’s the official description,
“Cyberpunk: Edgerunners tells a standalone, 10-episode story about a street kid trying to survive in a technology and body modification-obsessed city of the future. Having everything to lose, he chooses to stay alive by becoming an Edgerunner – a mercenary outlaw also known as a Cyberpunk.”
Cyberpunk Edgerunners is currently available to stream exclusively on Netflix. Cyberpunk 2077 is currently available on PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC,
