If you’re curious as to how the RPG powerhouse CD Projekt RED began way back in 1994, you’d probably be surprised to learn their company was founded by passionate gamers that literally had no clue how to make video games.
The company was founded by native Poles Marcin Iwiński and Michal Kiciński as a way to legitimately import US-made games to the new Polish market economy, in a bid to combat rampant piracy. In an interview with Glixel, Iwiński talked up how they started creating The Witcher series.
“I started the company with a friend from high school, Michał Kiciński. We started as game distributors, but in all honesty, we weren’t very good at distribution. We were very good at games, at picking games and being the first to localize them for Poland.
“Initially, the big part of our motivation to start the company was that we would have access to new titles. It sounds super silly, but we were gods. We were the lords who were deciding what was being distributed in Poland and what was not.
“So we were getting access to all this stuff. I found one of the first ads that we placed in a Polish gaming mag, and our hours were from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. And I scratched my head and thought, ‘What were we doing?’ Of course! We were closing early to play games.”
After getting the rights to distribute the iconic Warcraft 2 at their first CES, they started officially localizing games for the Polish market, prior to thinking of making their own games.
“We had the dream of making our own games. But we had no clue how to make games. It was more like passionate gamers who knew how to run a gamer-friendly publishing business starting to develop games, without any knowledge of how to develop games whatsoever. And that was Witcher 1.”
Iwiński naturally talked up the moral ambiguity in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books, and how his love for that became the main inspiration for their games.
“That’s straight from Sapkowski’s writing: no clear distinction between good and evil, and always think about your choices but you don’t know what the result will be. It’s like real life. That’s what we loved about it. I think it’s about deconstructing the hero and building a different version of a hero. [In] a lot of American games it’s clearer what is good.
“We started the company as two gamers distributing games in Poland. We were fascinated with RPGs. That’s how we met Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk from BioWare, who were our role models. We played all the Baldur’s Gate games. But it was always, like, there was this evil Sarevok and you go and find him and – [trumpet sound] – you won. We thought, hey, that’s great, but let’s add a new flavor to it: more ambiguous, more complex characters who are more real because they remind us of ourselves.
“We are not always happy with our life choices. Things get terribly complicated, sometimes, starting from a very simple situation. You make a certain choice that you think is good and then you’re like, ‘Oh, I fucked up big time, man. What’s happening with my life?’ That’s a little bit Witcher.”
In case you missed it – you can read our review for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt here (we highly recommend it, it was our 2015 game of the year!). CD Projekt RED is currently working on their next RPG opus, Cyberpunk 2077. You can read more about that game here.
