(Credit: Netflix)

Video game adaptations have been a notoriously tough nut to crack ever since the infamous Super Mario Bros marked the industry’s first major console-to-screen movie more than 30 years ago, but Netflix has found a winning method albeit by virtually ignoring live-action entirely.

Instead, the streaming service has used the video game world as the jumping-off point for a slew of animated shows, with the company returning to the Cyberpunk well. In partnership with studio CD Projekt Red, a new series set in the dystopian sci-fi world is in development, following on from the recent Edgerunners.

Details beyond that remain scarce at this point, but it’s become clearer than ever that video game properties are going to continue forming the backbone of Netflix’s in-house animated output. Even The Witcher, the streamer’s highest-profile live-action adaptation to date, has Sirens of the Deep on the way to pick up from where 2021’s Nightmare of the Wolf left off.

Beyond that, November sees the return of League of Legends spinoff Arcane for its second and final season, which is just the tip of the iceberg. Hayley Atwell will voice the title character in Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, and Liev Schrieber will replace Michael Ironside as the voice of Sam Fisher in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Deathwatch.

That’s without even mentioning Netflix’s plans to create an entire Pokemon universe that spans both live-action and animation, an incoming Minecraft series, new episodes of Castlevania: Nocturne, or plans to bring Devil May Cry and Assassin’s Creed to screens.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners premiered in September 2022, with the ten-episode series unfolding in the futuristic Californian metropolis of Night City. After losing everything in a drive-by shooting, protagonist David Martinez decides to take his talents to the opposite side of the law by working as an edgerunner, a black market mercenary bolstered by technological bells and whistles.

The brief teaser showcased during Netflix’s Geeked Week hasn’t offered anything else other than confirmation another Cyberpunk show is in the works, but “stay tuned” is enough to generate excitement among fans of both the game and the series.

Not that it was a particularly surprising development, with CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michal Nowakowski confirming during a company earnings call last month that “we are definitely planning to do more in terms of animation with Cyberpunk.”

With Edgerunners having been a Netflix exclusive, there was realistically only one place it was going to happen.