The Cyberpunk 2077 Twitch feed is acting funny, tune in here

Update: The 48-minute gameplay reveal of Cyberpunk 2077 was broadcast live today on Twitch. An archive of the footage from YouTube has been embedded above.

Original story: The Twitch feed for CD Projekt Red, the Polish developers behind the Witcher series of role-playing games, is acting a little funny this morning. For more than five hours, it’s been spewing a seemingly endless stream of nonsense — white characters on a black background with no sound at all. Fans on Reddit are convinced that it’s a teaser, and that a public demonstration of Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay is on the way.

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced way back in 2012, well before the release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. More than six years later, CD Projekt made a huge splash at E3 2018, when it showed off a 50-minute gameplay demo behind closed doors. News from the Gamescom convention, held just last week in Germany, indicates that the same demo was shown privately there as well. Even more tantalizing, however, is word that a rough version of the game is now playable start to finish.

That aligns with Polygon’s recent interview with the creator of the Cyberpunk universe, game designer Mike Pondsmith. At this year’s Gen Con convention earlier this month, he let slip that many unseen areas of the game world were available for him to explore during his hands-on demo of the game.

Perhaps today is the day that CD Projekt decides to share with the public what, until now, it has only shown in private. You can follow the studio’s Twitch feed, which is live right now. Whatever happens, hopefully it won’t take as long as Bethesda Softworks’ latest Twitch stunt, which took an entire day to get to the point.

Update: Dropping the first part of the code — iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAA — from the stream into a base64 convertor reveals the letters “PNG,” leading many to believe the data stream is actually a still image. Sleuths on Reddit are now trying to gin up ways to capture the data using optical character recognition so they can attempt to decode the entire string. Others aren’t so sure, and are instead trying to determine if the data is simply a quick-and-dirty video loop and the harbinger of something bigger to be broadcast on Twitch.