Everything We Know About Cyberpunk 2077's Adam Smasher

The long saga of Cyberpunk 2077's extended development cycle is nearly at an end, with all signs pointing to CD Projekt Red releasing the game on its revised Dec. 10 release date. That means there is no better time than now to start diving into the lore of the Cyberpunk 2077 world to learn about how Night City got to where it is and meet the colorful cyborgs that inhabit it.

While gamers have already spent a lot of time exploring characters like Johnny Silverhand, the digital ghost/rockstar insurgent voiced by Keanu Reeves, and fashion icon Evelyn Parker, less time has been dedicated to the game's antagonists. Cyberpunk 2077's Night City is under the control of competing factions and autocratic corporations who hold on to power through brutish enforcers. One of those enforcers, Adam Smasher, has a special relationship with Silverhand: Adam is the cyborg who killed him.

Here is everything known (so far) about Adam Smasher in CD Projekt Red's upcoming Cyberpunk 2077.

While details from the CD Projekt Red team about Adam Smasher's involvement in the game or backstory are thin, the developers confirmed his in-game presence with a brief appearance in a trailer titled "The Gig." Here, Smasher appears while the characters plan a heist against Arasaka, one of the corporations that run Night City, which matches his factional alignment in the tabletop Cyberpunk game.

From the tabletop game and extended universe around it, more details of Smasher's life are available. A video from GameSpot explains his early life via Cyberpunk lore, growing up in the Bronx district of New York City sometime before 2000. Smasher's first exposure to violence took form in gang activities and then transferred into a brief stint in the army. After being discharged for insubordination, Smasher returned to New York to offer his services as a gun for hire.

However, his life as a human mercenary wouldn't last forever. One day, enemies hit Smasher with rocket launcher rounds that disintegrated most of his body. The Arasaka corporation rebuilt his shattered torso with machine augmentations and made Smasher a Solo, or cybernetic mercenary, in exchange for 15 years of service.

After Adam Smasher was reconstructed into a cyborg mercenary, he spent the 2010s fulfilling his service obligation to Arasaka and stoking a rivalry with fellow Solo, Morgan Blackhand.

That rivalry would reach deadly new heights when Morgan Blackhand and Johhny Silverhand led a strike team into Arasaka headquarters. This assault, a part of the Fourth Corporate War of 2022, led to Silverhand's death and the detonation of the pocket nuclear weapon that Silverhand and Blackhand had brought with them to destroy the Arasaka headquarters' Secure Database.

The nuclear weapon's explosion would kill half a million people in the surrounding Night City and begin the Night City Holocaust. Smasher would survive the encounter thanks to the DaiOni power armor that encased his metal frame, which either kept him safe or protected enough of his body to be recovered and rebuilt by Arasaka.

While it is unclear what Adam Smasher has been up to in the years separating Johnny Silverhand's death and his digital reincarnation in Cyberpunk 2077, it certainly sets the stage for an intense in-game reunion — just watch out for spoilers!