The Witcher: How CD Projekt Red Created One of the Biggest Names in Gaming
CD Projekt Red may now have more than 800 developers working across some of the biggest names in RPGs, but when it first began work on The Witcher – which was released 15 years ago this week – it had none of that. It was known for distributing games in Poland, not developing, and very few outside of the country had heard of it or its new project, a dark fantasy RPG based on a series of novels and short stories.
What CD Projekt Red did have was ambition, and despite not knowing at times if it would even complete development on the original game, the team had already planned a trilogy of Witcher titles that would eventually make the game a household name. It’s almost as if a studio with no experience announced a trilogy of Lord of the Rings games, promising gameplay and a narrative as epic as Tolkien’s original. CD Projekt Red proved any naysayers wrong.
Following the announcement that 2007’s The Witcher is being remade in Unreal Engine 5, IGN looks back at the franchise’s beginnings to see what made it successful in the first place.
The Witcher was originally released in 2007.
It's not that the CD Projekt Red group knew The Witcher would be successful, of course, as several members of its original team hadn’t created a game before, and none of them had created a game of this size. “We didn't know if the game would be a success or not,” Marcin Blacha, story director at CD Projekt Red, tells IGN. “Of course, we hoped it would appeal to players, but 15 years ago we all had much less experience than we do now, and we found it harder to judge what was right and what was not. Since we all liked RPGs very much, we wanted to be appreciated primarily by fans of this genre.”
Though a love for video games was always at its heart, CD
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