Royce (Simon Randall): The Maelstrom boss who charged twice for the same robot

In the abandoned All Foods plant in the Northside industrial district, an elevator carries V and Jackie Welles up to the room where Dum Dum is waiting for them. He is the spokesman for Maelstrom, the most heavily chromed gang in Watson. He asks them to sit on a couch; Jackie refuses until V talks him into it. Dum Dum offers his inhaler, has the Flathead brought in, a prototype combat robot the gang stole from a Militech convoy, and runs it through his implants to show what it can do. When V says they will take it, Royce walks in. His name is Simon Randall, he is the man with the red optics, and he has just taken over Maelstrom. The robot had already been paid for: the fixer Dexter DeShawn bought it from Brick, the gang’s boss. But the deal was with Brick, and Brick no longer runs things. If V wants the robot, V will have to pay for it again. Royce is the villain of “The Pickup,” one of the first main jobs in Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020). The game’s database describes him as a paranoid, erratic leader who has nonetheless run the gang’s business with surprising success. (This file reveals what happened to Brick.)

// The theoryA yardstick of their own

In Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (1955), Albert K. Cohen asked why so much juvenile delinquency was not after loot. His answer was status frustration. Working-class boys are judged, above all at school, by the middle-class measuring rod: ambition, deferred gratification, good manners, control of aggression. Many cannot meet it. The way out they find is not individual but collective: they band together with others in the same position and build a status system of their own, one in which they can win. That delinquent subculture turns respectable values upside down through reaction formation: what society punishes becomes merit. Cohen described it as non-utilitarian, malicious and negativistic. Five years later, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960) distinguished three variants, criminal, conflict and retreatist, depending on the illegitimate opportunities each neighborhood offered, and Walter Miller (1958) proposed that gangs express “focal concerns” such as toughness, smartness and autonomy.

// The subjectA coup in a food factory

The game tells Royce’s story in three moments. The first happens before V arrives and can be read on the All Foods computers. Patricia, one of the gang, warned Brick that Royce was a feral animal and advised him to get rid of him; Brick replied that nobody had asked for her opinion and that five years in the business made him a Methuselah. Royce wrote to Brick telling him to gather his people, all of them, on the production floor for a big deal. The last message, written by Royce to two of his men, says Brick has been demoted to the cage, gives the cell code and orders them to keep it to themselves. The second moment is the negotiation: Royce demands that V pay again, and if V takes too long to say how, he shoots V in the head and the game ends. If V pays ten thousand eurodollars out of pocket without having taken Militech’s offer, V gets the robot and Dum Dum walks V out in peace. The third moment is up to the player. Meredith Stout, a Militech agent, can offer V a credchip to pay with, loaded with malware she does not mention. If V hands it over without cleaning it or giving a warning, the virus hits the gang’s systems, Maelstrom turns hostile and Royce reappears at the exit inside an armored Militech exoskeleton, weakened by the attack. If V cleans the chip, or pays with V’s own money after accepting it, Militech storms the plant anyway and Royce ends up fighting the soldiers alongside V. (Spoiler warning.) If the visit ends in a firefight, against Maelstrom or against Militech, V can find Brick alive in a cell rigged with a mine and choose to free him, kill him or leave him there. If Royce survives, he appears again later at the Totentanz, the club that serves as the gang’s headquarters, in the side job “Second Conflict.”

// The crackA gang that is also a company

Cohen described a subculture that steals for the fun of it, and Maelstrom is the opposite: a business. The All Foods computers show a mole inside Militech, Anthony Gilchrist, who passed the gang the numbers of company transports, with the paperwork already cooked to mark the cargo as lost on arrival, and Royce’s own computer holds a list of possible buyers for the stolen gear: Rogue of the Afterlife, Dex himself, Mr. Hands and the Voodoo Boys. That looks more like Cloward and Ohlin’s criminal subculture, connected to the legitimate world, than like Cohen’s. Even Royce’s madness has a commercial use: the game’s database suggests that, if he really is mad, he is the most methodical madman in the city, and that he does well because doing business with him is the only way to stay alive.

The second objection is more serious. Chrome does not invert Night City’s values: it exaggerates them. Corporations sell implants as improvement, and a Militech document for clients, which V can read in the same plant, boasts that its convoy guards are fitted with the highest-grade combat cyberware. Maelstrom pushes a dominant value to the extreme, which looks more like the subterranean values of David Matza and Gresham Sykes (1961) than like Cohen’s reaction formation. Cohen was also thinking of teenagers, and Royce is a hardened adult at the head of a gang. And explaining is not excusing: the theory says why, in Maelstrom, a coup against the boss and a broken deal earn prestige, not why a man locks his predecessor in a cell rigged with a mine, or why his gang turns a dissident into a guard dog who can no longer speak.