Wake up, samurai, a new cryptic Cyberpunk and Nvidia announcement is about to drop — and it involves Chromebooks

Dogtown in Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty
(Image credit: CD Projekt)

Google, along with Nvidia and Cyberpunk 2077 studio CD Projekt Red, teased a cryptic message involving cracking a code, a gaming announcement, and two dates. 

The first date, according to the description on a surprise YouTube video on the official Chromebook channel, is November 18th, 2023, at 8PM ET and corresponds to a real-life location – Times Square in New York City. And the second date is November 20th, 2023, on YouTube, which most likely means on the same Chromebook channel as the mysterious message. But oddly enough, there’s no date for the second ‘location.’

There’s also the first half of the message in the description: “Game more than you thought you could and get ready to crack the code.” 

Google has been promoting Chromebooks' gaming capabilities for a while now, and the reveal that it could natively play Minecraft, a slew of some of the best PC games, as well as stream titles gives a strong hint as to what the upcoming event or launch will reveal. Google's Chromebook Plus line promises to standardizing the specs for Chromebooks going forward, ensuring they can handle native gaming even better than they do now, but play Cyberpunk 2077 natively? Probably not.

The other two partners in on this campaign are also well entrenched in the gaming market, with Nvidia putting out the best graphics cards for PC gaming and its GeForce Now subscription-based cloud gaming service, and CD Projekt Red, the development studio behind Cyberpunk 2077. 

It'll be interesting to see what all this “cracking the code” is all about.. Judging from the fact that two separate dates are listed in the video, it’s most likely an event in which participants have to combine two different clues from those two dates and then combine or solve them together for the answer to this mystery.

If Google is going so far as to create a marketing campaign involving one of the most expensive places in the world to advertise in, it must be something worth it. It’ll be interesting to see how it all unfolds starting this weekend.

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Allisa James
Computing Staff Writer

Named by the CTA as a CES 2023 Media Trailblazer, Allisa is a Computing Staff Writer who covers breaking news and rumors in the computing industry, as well as reviews, hands-on previews, featured articles, and the latest deals and trends. In her spare time you can find her chatting it up on her two podcasts, Megaten Marathon and Combo Chain, as well as playing any JRPGs she can get her hands on.