Johnny Silverhand

Johnny Silverhand — born Robert John Linder — was once a soldier, then became the loudest voice of rebellion in Night City’s history. A legend wrapped in chrome and trauma, he’s the frontman of the incendiary rock band Samurai, whose songs weren’t just anthems but acts of war against the corps. His music burned with anti-corporate rage, but beneath the swagger was a haunted man — an ex-soldier of the U.S. government’s disastrous Central American wars, turned radical after seeing how megacorps replaced nations as the true tyrants.

After deserting, he reinvented himself as Johnny Silverhand — the name symbolizing both his cybernetic prosthetic and his refusal to ever be owned again. He became the poster child for the rockerboy revolution: charismatic, manipulative, and dangerously idealistic. To his followers, he was a prophet. To his enemies, a terrorist.

His legend peaks in 2023, when he leads an assault on @Arasaka Tower to rescue his lover, Alt Cunningham — a @Netrunner who created Soulkiller, an AI capable of copying and deleting consciousness. Johnny’s team succeeds only partially; Alt’s body dies, her mind uploaded. Johnny vanishes in the chaos, presumed dead — or immortalized as data within the digital ether.

But Johnny’s ghost never left. His engram, embedded in a biochip decades later, would resurface through V — merging their fates in a philosophical war over freedom, identity, and the soul. In every timeline, Johnny remains the embodiment of rebellion — the eternal middle finger raised against the corporate machine that stole humanity’s future.

Some say he’s gone. Others swear they still hear him in the noise of Night City’s streets — the hum of neon and the rage of the dispossessed echoing to a beat only Johnny Silverhand could write.