Seeing Red: The Story of CD Projekt

Eurogamer has put together a lengthy and well worth read concerning the history of CD Projekt, with plenty of quotes from its employees, and even previously undisclosed development details. Here’s a couple of interesting snippets:

Michal Kicinski took over development and BioWare helped out with an engine (Aurora). Iwinski was friendly with Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, and BioWare even went a step further, offering E3 stand space to the game if the demo was any good. It was, so BioWare did – and The Witcher couldn’t help but be noticed in the stampede for Jade Empire in 2004. In a twist of fate, that was also when BioWare announced Dragon Age, a series The Witcher will go head to head with next year – only this time as an equal.

The Witcher 1, the game CD Projekt Red initially predicted would take 15 people to make, would end up taking 100 people five years to make, and cost an unprecedented 20 million Polish Zloty (the equivalent of around £12-£16 million in today’s money, Iwinski believes). More importantly, adds Iwinski, “That was all the money we had. Plus some.”

Poland had no game developers to fill the team with, and CD Projekt Red had no international pull to entice people from overseas, so bankers and doctors and people from all walks of life with a passion for games and trying something new were converted instead. But like CD Projekt Red, they didn’t know what they were doing – they were learning on the job.

Ideas spiralled out of control as the team tried to build something as complicated as Baldur’s Gate and as epic as The Witcher fantasy. The game was cut two or three times but still they ended up with 100 hours of gameplay. “This just shows that probably, if we wouldn’t have cut it…” ‘What,’ I interject, ‘it would be bigger than Skyrim?’ “No,” he laughs, getting the reference, “probably more likely we would have been out of business.”

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After the Enhanced Edition of Witcher 1 (offered as a free patch for existing owners, as with The Witcher 2), work started on two projects at once: The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3.

The Witcher 3 was a background project to build an engine that would work with consoles, because BioWare’s Aurora engine didn’t, and consoles were a place CD Projekt Red always wanted to be. The plan was to move onto it after The Witcher 2.

The Witcher 2 would be built on Aurora again for PC, but it only got as far as a tech demo which, in those early days, Adam Badowski thinks “looked amazing”. Brilliantly, this leaked, and can be watched in this article (below). “We had a lot of leaks!” Badowski laughs.

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On the back foot, CD Projekt Red scrapped The Witcher 3 and used the engine it had created to make The Witcher 2 instead. Only, the engine wasn’t finished, so the first part of The Witcher 2 development was done blind, with nothing to prototype or test on. And then the global economic crisis brought CD Projekt to its knees, the scariest moment of Marcin Iwinski’s career.

What’s so impressive about this period of intense pressure is that Iwinski refused, even then, to take the easy way out and sign a quick deal with a publisher, jeopardising the thing he cherishes most: creative control. The Witcher 1 took six months to sign to Atari because the contract wasn’t right. Other new studios would have buckled, but Iwinski kept his head. Today, The Witcher 3 is funded entirely by CD Projekt. “We self-publish, practically.”

The Witcher 2 took half the time to build that its predecessor did, despite being every bit as ambitious and with an engine to build as well. An entire location called The Valley of the Flowers had to be cut, even though it had “an amazing story plot”. “It’s not a girly place,” Adam Badowski quickly adds, “it’s a land of elves.” And elves in The Witcher universe are as dirty and mean as everything else. The game’s third act was also cut short because the team ran out of time.