Night City has more than sixty easter eggs catalogued by players since the game launched in December 2020, and most of them don't show up on any marked mission on the map — you have to go looking, at the right time, with the right NPC, down the right alley. Seven of these secrets get nearly all the search interest on Google and Reddit to this day, and the reason is simple: they're the ones that take more than luck to find. ## The seven map points worth the detour Before you go sprinting across Night City, it's worth separating what's actually an easter egg from what's just a random item dropped into the scenery. A real easter egg in Cyberpunk 2077 usually has three layers: the reference itself, the context hiding it (a mission, a side NPC, a specific time of day), and the "why" that only clicks if you've played something else from CD Projekt Red or you're into old-school sci-fi. - **Hideo Kojima at the Konpeki Plaza bar.** During the main mission "The Heist," right at the start of the game, V and Jackie Welles head up to the hotel bar. A Japanese NPC sitting at a table, named "Oshima" in-game (a nod to filmmaker Nagisa Ōshima), is chatting with a few other people about a new project. It's Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding. Most players walk right past because the mission is pushing you forward — stop, go up to the bar before following Jackie, and he'll even ask if you know his work. - **Death Stranding's BB.** In a side job offered by River Ward, you need to break into a clandestine lab hunting for braindance data. Inside the facility there's a container holding a "BB" — the connection-child creature that Death Stranding's protagonist carries. Easy to miss because it's in a side room, off the obvious path to the mission objective. - **Blade Runner's white dove.** On the roof of the Advocet Hotel, in Vista Del Rey, there's a direct reference to Roy Batty's "tears in rain" monologue, complete with a white dove in the same style as the 1982 film. It's entirely optional — no mission pushes you up there, you only find it if you climb to the top of the building out of curiosity. - **The Batmobile in a forgotten trailer out in the Badlands.** North of the Sunset Motel fast travel point there's a tunnel. Halfway through, a hidden shipping container holds the Batmobile, which gets added straight to your garage. Inside the container there's a datashard packed with Batman references, except the character has been renamed "Murk Man" — likely to dodge copyright issues in the game's actual text. - **Akira's bike, renamed Kusanagi CT-3X.** In northern Japantown you can buy a bike identical to Kaneda's from Akira for 22,000 eddies from a vendor named Wakako. The name "Kusanagi" throws in a second reference, too — to Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell — two homages packed into one vehicle's name. - **Grove Street reimagined in Rancho Coronado.** In one of Night City's poorer districts there's a street crawling with gangs that reproduces, almost block for block, GTA San Andreas's Grove Street — the same neighborhood Carl Johnson calls home. More observant players also found a nearby side-NPC conversation referencing the mission "Wrong Side of the Tracks." - **GLaDOS hidden inside the Epistrophy mission.** In one of the game's funniest side jobs, you can contact an artificial intelligence that gradually reveals a personality identical to Portal's GLaDOS — sarcasm included. Worth noting: some of these locations shifted position or access after the big 2.0 update and the Phantom Liberty expansion, released in September 2023. CD Projekt Red reorganized entire districts in that update, so guides from 2021 sometimes point to coordinates that no longer quite work the same way. ## The pattern CD Projekt Red has been repeating since The Witcher Anyone who follows the Polish studio closely recognizes the signature. The Witcher 3 already had hidden references to Skyrim, to Diablo, to Monty Python — always placed in corners that required a detour, never on the main story path. Cyberpunk 2077 took that to another level because the game is urban, dense, full of apartments and alleys that serve no narrative function beyond simply existing. That leaves too much room to hide things in. What stands out is that most of the most-cited easter eggs aren't sitting in free-roam exploration spots — they're inside side missions that a lot of people skip precisely because they're optional. River Ward's mission, for instance, is one of the best-written in the game and still gets left out by anyone who only plays the main campaign. That means players rushing to finish the story miss out on the most elaborate easter eggs — not the obvious ones, like the Batmobile, but the ones carrying emotional weight, like Death Stranding's BB, which only lands right within the sad context of River's own storyline. ### The mistake almost every easter-egg hunter makes The most common mistake isn't looking in the wrong place. It's looking too fast. Most "every Cyberpunk 2077 easter egg" videos on YouTube show the player heading straight to the spot, no context, because the goal is the easy click. But that strips half the references of their point — the dove on the Advocet Hotel roof, for example, only lands if you've already seen Blade Runner and know what that monologue means for the character Roy Batty. Without that background, it's just a pixel pigeon on some random balcony. Another recurring mistake is trusting guides that mix real easter eggs with random loot-table items. There are lists floating around that list any rare weapon or any wall graffiti as a "hidden secret," which waters down the whole concept. A genuine easter egg has intent behind it — someone at the studio decided to put that there as a joke or a tribute, it's not something an algorithm spat out with the loot. The talking gun Skippy, for instance, which references The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is intentional: it has its own dialogue, its own personality, an easter egg inside the easter egg. There's also a detail only players who've gone for platinum would know: some of these secrets have a time window. The Kojima-based NPC, for example, is part of a scene with a lifespan inside the mission — if you spend too long exploring the hotel before heading up to the bar, you risk the scene already being over by the time you get there, because the game pushes the story forward whether or not you've seen it. This catches a lot of people off guard, since the natural flow of the mission never warns you that it's optional and time-limited. ## Worth finding even when you already know where to look Some argue an easter egg loses its charm once you know where to look for it — that the surprise is the whole point, and a guide kills that. I'd push back on that, partly. The joy of stumbling onto the Blade Runner dove on your own, with no idea it existed, is rare and almost accidental; most people putting 60, 80 hours into Cyberpunk 2077 will never wander onto that specific rooftop by chance. A guide doesn't replace the surprise — it just guarantees it happens for people who, otherwise, would never have seen any of it. What's left unanswered is how much more CD Projekt Red will keep stacking reference on top of reference in future updates and in the eventual Cyberpunk 2. If the Phantom Liberty pattern holds, there are very likely 2023-era easter eggs nobody's catalogued yet — tucked away in some empty apartment, waiting for someone to poke their nose where the mission never told them to.