The Arasaka Tower Attack of 2023 Explained: Johnny, Blackhand, Smasher and the Nuke

The Arasaka Tower attack was a Militech-backed raid on Arasaka's headquarters in Night City on the night of 20 August 2023, near the end of the Fourth Corporate War. It's the night Johnny Silverhand died, and it ended with a nuclear explosion that destroyed the tower and the city centre around it. The tabletop books tell one version of it, and Cyberpunk 2077 shows another through Johnny's memories, so this page covers both. (Cyberpunk RED; Cyberpunk 2077)

Why the raid happened#

By the summer of 2023 the war had been shut down almost everywhere except Night City, where Kei Arasaka was holding out in the tower with what was left of Arasaka's forces in North America. Since the start of the war Arasaka had kept its main Night City computers offline, sitting on decades of clean data at a time when the DataKrash was wrecking the Net. That database was the real target. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)

Johnny had his own reason. Spider Murphy had found out that Arasaka was holding Alt Cunningham, his former girlfriend, whose mind had been taken by Soulkiller ten years earlier. He signed on to get her back. (Cyberpunk RED)

Who was there#

The tabletop account splits the raiders into three teams. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)

• Team Alpha, under Johnny, with Militech special forces, the Aldecaldos' Lobos, the solos Rogue and Shaitan, the journalist Thompson and Spider Murphy. Their job was the Soulkiller labs: rescue Alt and wipe the latest Soulkiller. They were also a decoy, chosen because they'd draw Arasaka's attention. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)
• Team Beta, sent to the database in the sub-basement, with a tactical nuclear device to destroy it if it couldn't be taken. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)
• Team Omega, under Morgan Blackhand, a Militech strike force plus his own covert crew, acting as support and rescue. (Firestorm: Shockwave)

On Arasaka's side were Kei Arasaka, commanding from the tower, and Adam Smasher. (Firestorm: Shockwave; Cyberpunk RED)

What happened, in the tabletop account#

Johnny's team dropped from an AV onto the roof and fought their way down to the labs. Spider made contact with Alt, pulled her into her data suitcase, quietly copied some other files onto chips, and uploaded a virus to erase Soulkiller from the network. On the way, one of the Lobos saw Blackhand heading down a stairwell with a heavy case. (Cyberpunk RED)

Then Smasher arrived with two squads. The first attack cut down most of the Militech troops and Lobos and badly wounded Thompson. Spider, pinned down, used her suitcase to scatter pieces of Alt across the Net, each tagged so they could be found again. Johnny, who had left Alt behind once before and wasn't going to do it again, stepped out from cover with a gun in each hand and emptied both into Smasher. Smasher turned and cut him in half with an autoshotgun. (Cyberpunk RED)

Shaitan grabbed Smasher to buy the others time. Rogue stopped Spider going back for Johnny, telling her he was gone, and Spider slotted a chip that Alt had given her years before into the back of Johnny's skull. Her suitcase had been destroyed in the crossfire. The survivors dragged Thompson to the lift. (Cyberpunk RED)

On the roof, the team boarded the escape AV. Smasher appeared in power armour, holding up what was left of Shaitan, and Blackhand stepped off the AV to face him, ordering the others to leave without him. As they flew away, they could see the two of them fighting on top of the tower. Minutes later the bomb went off. (Cyberpunk RED)

Arasaka had a much bigger nuke of its own hidden under the building, kept in case Militech ever overran it. It never detonated. Afterwards a full-conversion firefighter, Samantha Stevens, pulls a body and Arasaka's unexploded device from the ruins. The book never says whose body it is, though fans often read it as Johnny's. (Cyberpunk RED)

The nuke and what it did#

The bomb that went off was a small Militech device, and it destroyed both towers and much of the corporate centre. Cyberpunk RED puts the dead at more than 12,000 in the blast alone, with hundreds of thousands more dying later, and says the dust kept Night City's skies red for almost two years. (Cyberpunk RED)

The US government blamed Arasaka, claiming it had set off its own failsafe nuke. It was a lie that held until the journalist Trace Santiago exposed it. The question of who actually triggered the device was never formally settled. (Cyberpunk RED)

How Cyberpunk 2077's flashback is different#

Cyberpunk 2077 shows the raid in the mission Love Like Fire, as a memory V relives from Johnny's engram on the Relic. It starts with Johnny saying goodbye to the crowd at a gig where Kerry Eurodyne is playing, before he meets Rogue and flies to the tower with Shaitan and Spider Murphy. (Cyberpunk 2077)

The differences from the tabletop version are big:

• The team. The game shows only Johnny, Rogue, Shaitan and Spider. There's no Morgan Blackhand, no Thompson and no separate teams. (Cyberpunk 2077)
• The bomb. Johnny carries the nuke himself, arms it and sends it down a lift shaft. In the tabletop account it went in with the other teams, and Blackhand was the one seen carrying a heavy case. (Cyberpunk 2077; Cyberpunk RED)
• Alt. Johnny uploads the virus to free her himself, guided by Spider. In the books Spider does the netrunning and scatters Alt across the Net. (Cyberpunk 2077; Cyberpunk RED)
• Johnny's death. In the game, Johnny makes it back to the roof, misses the escape helicopter when an explosion knocks him loose from Rogue's grip, and is shot by Smasher. He then wakes up in Arasaka's hands, is interrogated by Saburo Arasaka in person, and is put through Soulkiller, which is how his engram ends up in Arasaka's Mikoshi and later on the Relic. In the books he dies in the labs, cut in half. (Cyberpunk 2077; Cyberpunk RED)
• Who's in charge. The books have Kei Arasaka running the defence. In the game, the Arasaka leader Johnny faces is Saburo himself, who interrogates him and orders him put through Soulkiller. (Cyberpunk 2077; Firestorm: Shockwave)

The game tells you not to take its version at face value. Love Like Fire's own journal entry says that memories get replaced by the stories people tell us, and that the past is built on lies. Cyberpunk 2077's database entry on the bombing goes further: the only undisputed fact is the date, and everything else, from the casualties to who was behind it, is speculation, gossip and corporate PR. (Cyberpunk 2077)

So the safest reading is that the books tell what happened and the game tells what Johnny remembers. Both agree on the parts that matter most: Johnny went in for Alt, Smasher killed him, and the tower came down. For what came after, see the Fourth Corporate War and the Cyberpunk timeline. (Cyberpunk RED; Cyberpunk 2077)