(beeping)
(keyboard clicking)
(dramatic music)
- Hello friends,
and welcome to Poland.
We're in the capital city, Warsaw,
a place that survived countless eras of human devastation.
Battles, sieges, empires come and gone,
revolutions, socialism, and a couple of world wars too.
It's a resilient city
with historical scars that are impossible to ignore.
The place we're standing in right now is a great example,
a 20th century reconstruction
of the original Middle Ages town
that was flattened along with most of the rest of the city
during World War II.
The city planners using paintings from that era
to ensure it looked the same,
a modern adaptation
of something of significant cultural importance,
not too dissimilar from the story we're about to tell you.
The Witcher series turns 10 years old this month,
which gave us a wonderful excuse to fly across the world
to talk to the various people
behind the design of each game.
We spent a week here in Warsaw interviewing developers,
spending time with the team,
and learning about the place
that brought these stories to life.
In fact, it's impossible to talk about the Witcher
without taking into account the cultural landscape
that brought it about.
This is a uniquely Slavic game,
both in its lore, and the way in which it was designed.
And the company that created it is uniquely Polish,
born out of decades of bleak socialist rule.
So before we talk about Novigrad, neckers, and noonwraiths,
we must first tell the story of CD Projekt.
Our series on the Witcher
starts decades before a single line of code is ever written,
in a place called the Polish Peoples' Republic.
(foreboding music)
- You didn't have your passport at home,
you were not allowed to have it,
so every single time you wanted to go abroad,
you had to go to the passport office,
and then there was an interview.
Every single time you wanted to go abroad,
even for a few days, it was like, "Why are you going?
"So your family left and so, hmm, sorry.
"Cannot grant you the passport
"on the risk of you fleeing the country."
They had the greatest place on earth, you know.
So there were two kinds of leaving Poland.
So you could leave to the friendly bloc countries,
so like the eastern countries like Eastern Germany,
Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR,
Czech Republic, Slovakia, that was fairly easy,
and you were getting a special passport for that.
And I remember, even at the sudden point
they allowed you to have this passport
for these countries at home, it was unbelievable.
But then, going to the Western world was,
first of all, hard to get a passport,
but even if you had one, it was super expensive,
because you are, I mean, like, you know, a tiny fraction,
the average income was 5% or 10% what was in the West,
so not many people were able to afford it.
- [Danny] Marcin Iwinski, the co-founder of CD Projekt,
grew up behind what we in the West call the Iron Curtain.
When the Warsaw Pact was signed in 1955,
Europe was effectively split in half politically:
the capitalist West, and the socialist East.
Marcin grew up in Warsaw,
about as close to the West as you could be.
His parents did their best to protect him
from the reality of the world he grew up in.
His father, a documentarian,
would take work in the West a few months of the year
to earn money to bring back home.
- Sort of the socialists
started to sort of loosening the grip,
so first you were going,
the first trips were obviously Czechoslovakia,
Eastern Germany, Hungary.
And then, my first real, like, Western trip,
I went to Sweden, and that was the first time
I boarded a plane, and I was on a plane.
It was incredible because,
just remember, I was early in my teens,
I don't know, 11, 12 years old,
so I had a stewardess sort of walking me through.
I was a kid and I boarded the plane, I arrive in Stockholm,
and then my parents picked me up,
and the first moment we stopped at a supermarket,
and it's a supermarket, what's that?
And, you know, the jaw is dropping,
that's an abundance of everything, like,
I still remember the crates of 7-Up, and I was like
you know, or like the toys department,
simple things like that.
So Poland had none of that, like zero.
You had places to buy some imported stuff.
It was super expensive.
You were normally never buying them,
and suddenly you go to the West
and you see they have everything.
Why don't we have it?
So, yeah.
For me, this period of time was never, like, really painful.
The difference,
for example, when I'm watching the all-Polish comedies
from these times, or movies, for me it's funny.
For my parents, it's not funny at all.
So two different realities.
(portentous music)
- [Danny] Presumably then,
things that were brought in from the West
was it more colorful or something?
- Yeah, totally, totally.
Like,
it's actually a very good point because, for me,
the predominant color of, not even Poland, Warsaw: gray.
So socialism for me is gray.
And then, after several years,
I went for the first time to Moscow,
and I said, "Wow, that's where the color comes from!"
That's gray.
Everything here is gray, you know.
So, and then the West started to bring colors, variety.
I still remember, they opened the first Burger King
right next to my high school.
It's like, okay, I'm a vegetarian since 25 years by the way,
but anyway, back in the day I wasn't,
so we were queuing four to five hours
to get into the Burger King, and it was like a
like a temple of
of the
of the Western, you know, symbols.
Like, I think it sounds very high-level,
but that's what it was for us.
We could actually taste the West.
- [Danny] Things from the West carried a cultural weight
once they made it across the border.
So for somebody who was interested in games,
few things were more wondrous
than the computers that ran them.
- There was the Atari, I think 65XE.
Or the cassette player and the cartridges: that was popular
because someone started importing them here.
But those two were fairly expensive,
and then the Commodore 64.
And in high school, it was already started opening up,
so it was more, I think,
then, of course, the technology was progressing,
so PCs were still kinda like the Hercules and the EGA cards,
so that wasn't really very attractive,
but then there was Amiga, and Amiga here in Poland was huge,
and actually from Spectrum, I moved directly to Amiga,
and it was like, I don't know,
from Famitsu moving to, probably PS4.
- [Danny] Right. Did you have 500 or 600?
- I had the 500. That was
that was the best one.
- [Danny] And also, all of these systems,
incredibly easy to copy games for.
- Of course, that's a very important thing,
because initially it was small,
so it was really like a hobbies thing.
The computer market here in Warsaw
and every single big city,
geeks and hobbyists exchanging things they have,
but then it started growing into business,
so when more people got Amigas and, actually, you know,
then some people were bringing these Amigas
and selling them here, going every week to Berlin,
buying them, and reselling them here with a profit,
then it started growing, so it's sort of the
it was still kinda small for, like, the
looking the size of the market,
but then, in my class, I don't know, out of 30,
I don't know, maybe eight kids had computers.
So it started growing.
- [Danny] Players would flock to computer markets
to get games and magazine,
like miniature conventions every weekend,
with friends and strangers exchanging games,
making copies on cassette tapes,
and discussing rumors about the games that were coming out.
The mysticism of these analog talismans comes across
when Marcin tells me about these days.
In fact, because the data was based on tapes,
some Polish radio stations would even
broadcast games over the airwaves for players to copy.
- So they were like, "Hey, tune in at
"5:10pm, and then
"start recording,"
and then it was like, "doo-doot, doo-dldldldlddldldldl,"
and then
and then people were just recording
and then replaying them to their computers,
but we had all these Grundigs, and are using TDK tapes,
and then, you know, recording, and then replaying,
and we were like, "Wow, it's so cool."
And then, you know, some people had collections
which were like couple thousand tapes.
- [Danny] Right.
- Yeah, couple thousand tapes, all with games.
- The Polish video game community
was ravenous for new games,
trading them at markets, copying them from their friends,
even recording them off the radio for damn's sake,
but to get games into that ecosystem,
first of all you had to get them into the country,
and that's where Marcin found his angle.
- You know, I wasn't a coder.
I wasn't like a music composer.
I wasn't an art guy.
So the only thing I could do, be probably a swapper, yeah?
There was the magazine called Your Sinclair, about Spectrum,
and they were reviewing games.
At the end, there was a section with
with ads, like the tiny ads.
People were advertising, like,
"Hey, if you wanna swap games," I don't know,
"send me a list," and it was all happening by mail,
so you'd have to go to the post office, post a letter,
then they were writing you back.
How crazy it sounds today, yeah, a letter.
Writing something on paper (laughs).
- [Danny] It's like an e-mail that takes a week.
- Yeah, no, actually two (laughs).
Guy was from Greece.
I wrote in that, "Hey, I'm Marcin,
"and I would like to swap games.
"The problem is that I don't have any new ones.
"If that's okay, I will be sending you every single time,
"two cassette tapes.
"One you will keep for yourself,
"and the other one you will record
"whatever new stuff you have and send it back to me."
And then I thought he will not write me back,
and then one day a tape arrives with games that
nobody has in Poland.
And then I'm bringing them to the computer market,
and I'm the man.
Yeah, I'm the king of the hill.
How cool is that?
And that's how my swapping career started.
- [Danny] Technology evolved, and so too did the swappers.
Marcin got his hand on a modem
and began logging onto BBS systems,
and pulling games off the Internet.
Suddenly, his stand at the market
had the latest games every single week,
and what's most important about this is that none of it,
the swapping, downloading, copying off the radio,
was technically illegal.
Copyright law was a worry for the West,
but in socialist Poland, it simply didn't exist.
- There was no copyright law in Poland.
Even if there would be one back in the day,
people wouldn't buy software
because they were not able to afford it.
The legal market was super tiny.
There were already some companies working,
but as we are emerging out of socialism,
you know, they wanted to civilize
part by part, piece by piece, and at a certain moment they,
in '94 actually, that they established a copyright.
That's actually when we started CD Projekt.
At a certain point, one of my friends from the scene said,
"Wow, I just got a CD-ROM, and it's so cool,
"and I'm playing 7th Guest, Mad Dog McCree,"
and I really got a lot of my savings,
and I bought one of the first CD-ROMs in Poland.
And then I got these games,
he put me in touch with a wholesaler
somewhere in, I think, Indiana.
They were not specializing in games, per se.
They had a very huge offer of XXX stuff,
but we were not tempted.
(laughter)
We (laughs)
so whenever we are get
getting a
a catalog, big part of it was
you know, Crazy Pamela's, and all that stuff.
But there was 7th Guest, you
you could
you could be suspicious
about the name of Mad Dog McCree could also,
but actually you could take any gaming name, Diablo, hmm?
- [Danny] Yeah (laughs), right yeah.
Marcin's school friend, Michal Kicinski,
was selling on the market that he was importing for.
Together, they were able to take advantage
of the expanding market for compact discs.
CD-ROMs were a huge disruptor for the games market,
while even in Poland there were manufacturing plants
spitting out floppy discs,
CD-ROMs were incredibly expensive to create.
Single-speed burners ranged in the thousands,
while an individual CD-R in Poland
could cost a weeks wages.
It simply cost too much and took too long to make copies,
but at the same time,
the amount of data that they could hold
made them incredibly valuable to consumers.
Encarta encyclopedia may seem
like an expensive way of using Wikipedia today,
but back then it was effectively replacing
entire shelves of books.
For games, this meant far more data, music,
voiceovers, richer textures, FMV video.
Marcin and Michal started importing American laser discs
and packaging them with Polish boxes and Polish manuals,
but the team wanted to do more with localization,
even if their peers in the market disagreed.
You see, at the time, the accepted market knowledge
was that there wasn't a market
for localized games in Poland.
Gaming was a niche market there,
and so localized games were even more niche.
But what CD Projekt reckoned
was that that was actually the wrong way around.
The reason they thought games were niche,
was that so few of them were available in Polish,
especially in the '90s,
where the country had only just opened up to the West,
and levels of English-speaking
were far less than they are today.
To test this theory, they needed a guinea pig,
so they started with a kids' game.
- [Marcin] One of the first titles we localized,
fully localized, was Ace Ventura,
and we actually found a guy who helped us to localize it.
He did a bloody good job.
- [Danny] Wow!
What's the Polish for alrighty then?
- Uh...
(laughter)
I don't remember, actually. (laughs)
Ace Ventura was the first one,
and actually there were some songs,
so we recorded the songs in the studio, and it was a blast.
People loved it.
Lower price point, like a typical mass-market proposition,
and, you know, also the first game, so
instead of hundreds, we started selling small thousands.
- [Danny] Localization was working.
Polish players were willing to pay
to have games in their native language,
but what Marcin would learn
is that they were actually solving a cost problem
for the publishers too.
Back then, games were translated into other languages,
but usually at a high cost to the publishers.
Developers would take on the work themselves,
and usually charge high Western rates
to translate games into French, German, Spanish,
and other common European languages,
but languages like Polish were considered exotic
and charged even more,
so translating them made little sense,
considering the size of the market.
The other issue
with creating a Polish language option for these games
was the risk that these Polish versions of the game
would flood back into Western Europe.
The cost of living in Poland was but a fraction
of that in the West, so games had to be much, much cheaper.
If they'd made multi-lingual versions of the game,
the publisher would risk cheap Polish copies of the game
arriving in Germany and beyond,
but if CD Projekt were able to create
a purely Polish version of the game,
this would never happen.
Few people in the West spoke Polish either.
The guys had their business model.
After Ace, they struck a deal with MGM
to localize the Pink Panther,
and it wasn't long before they were setting their sights
on bigger fish.
While established Polish distributors
were concerned with big companies like EA,
CD Projekt managed to strike a deal with Interplay.
Their first few deals weren't great.
They ended up sitting on a stockpile
of Dungeon Keeper 2 they couldn't shift,
but it started a conversation
which would eventually lead them
to securing a publishing deal for Baldur's Gate,
3,000 units with all the risk on CD Projekt's shoulders.
They needed to make this work.
- [Computer] (speaking in Polish)
- First we took famous Polish actors
for the main characters, for the narrator,
and then the NPCs,
and they are still, like the iconic voices.
We prepared a huge, beautiful-looking box with the five CDs.
We struck a deal with the local D&D book publishers,
so we actually added their D&D,
totally not related to Baldur's Gate,
but it didn't matter because the value was there,
it was the flavor, and then we added a map.
A true collector's edition.
Just to put it into perspective, before we signed a deal,
we were shitting our pants with Michal
that these 3,000 units can bankrupt us,
because if we'll fail, you know, we're done.
We're never seeing a lot of money in it,
and maybe we'll not sell 3,000, or 1,000, maybe do more.
Of course, you have these doubts, you have these fears.
By the time we are going to the market,
we have fixed orders for 18,000 units--
- [Danny] Oh my God!
- Yes, so, like, that's
that's the proportion,
and before, the best game that we are selling
was maybe 1,000, maybe 2,000,
and to put it into perspective,
there is not even one retail chain
in Poland back in the day,
so it's all wholesalers,
guys dealing on these computer markets, mom and pop stores.
Our warehouse, where our office is
our warehouse
our room (laughs)
was able to take 5,000 units, maybe.
- [Danny] Oh my Gosh.
- Maybe eight if we put it all around the corridors,
and desks, and shit.
So we actually took a separate warehouse.
There was a queue of these wholesalers early in the morning,
and they actually
there was a fist fight in front of the warehouse:
who will get the stock first?
We sold the whole 8,000 units.
Within the first year we sold 50,000 units.
- [Danny] God.
- That's what happened.
That's--
- [Danny] That's the making of a company.
- Yeah.
Why should I buy something when I have it for free?
Software is free, how it was would you pay for?
And suddenly you have this collectors' piece,
with the cultural seal of quality,
and of course the first and foremost,
most important thing, the game was great (laughs).
- [Danny] It helps that it was also Baldur's Gate, yeah.
- Yeah, sorry, sorry, I should have mentioned that
very beginning because, like, "Hey, we created it,
"and Baldur's Gate was crap, by the way.
"Don't play, man."
No, no, the game was amazing,
so people couldn't wait to play it, but it was for them,
it was in their local language,
and actors signed up for it,
the value of the package was great,
so it was amazing to have it on your shelf.
And this was sort of beating the pirates to the punch,
because of course they copied it a few days later,
they had all our games copied 24 to 48 hours later.
- [Danny] Did you go down there?
- Yeah, of course, we would.
And they had
they had this
we had this sort of seal of quality,
the professional Polish version,
they were putting on every goddamn game,
whether it was our stolen version or not.
They were actually even localizing themselves
quite often with really badly
bad Polish, like with a Ukrainian accent,
recorded in a kitchen
(imitates woman speaking in Polish)
Mom, I'm recording, "And then they came, and la-la-la,"
you know, you had stuff like that, you know.
And I think it's pretty much all around the world.
Right now, don't buying, but downloading from torrents,
but if there is a game you deeply care about,
you don't pirate it.
- [Danny] Yeah.
CD Projekt understood the Polish market more than anyone,
but over the next few years,
as they'd helped to legitimize it,
publishers were trying to get more and more involved.
Marcin knew that the long-term health of the company
required that they diversify.
They had never made a game,
but the money being brought in from their distribution wing
put them in the unique position where they had the capital
to self-fund a game if they wanted to.
- And then we went to
E3, and it was
the first and only time
when we visited Interplay in Irvine.
They invited us over, and it's amazing.
It was just, you know, blown away
like the kids in a chocolate factory.
We saw the Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance,
because it was the first presentation,
and at the end of the presentation,
they tell us that it's just a console title,
almost like PlayStation II I believe, and
the market here, 90, 95% PC,
console, still Super ID,
and then we started thinking,
"Hey, could we make a PC version?
"I don't know.
"Can we convince them to make a PC version?
"Yes? No?"
So at the end of the day, during the dinner,
we approached our Interplay contacts from Interplay Europe,
and said, "Hey guys, you know,
"why don't you do a PC version?"
It was like, "Hey, we have no resource for that.
"Why don't you do it?"
We're like, "Hmm, okay, let's think about it."
So like a few weeks later,
we flew over to London to talk to them.
They gave us the PS2 dev kit,
and we smuggled it back to Poland in our carry-ons.
So we already had the dev kit; we had the source code.
And so we found the guy that was--
- [Danny] PS2 dev kit was pretty big.
- Oh, yeah, it was huge.
I actually was
I was actually afraid that the customs would control us.
We had no papers for it.
The customs was kinda hard back in the day.
- The guys returned from Poland
with their PlayStation 2 development kit,
and got in touch with Sebastian Zielinski,
the creator of the Mortyr engine,
to see about creating a port,
but soon after, news about Interplay went sour.
Their UK contact sent them over a contract,
but advised them not to sign it,
as the company looked like it was folding,
and sure enough, the inevitable happened.
The deal was off, and the guys were left with a dev kit,
but the seed had been planted.
For years, they had just been middlemen.
Now was the time for them to take the leap
into games development.
When CD Projekt initially went down the road
to try and create their own video game,
somebody on the team suggested that
before they create their own IP,
maybe they should check in
to see if they could get the license
for a particularly popular set of fantasy novels.
Now these novels were basically unknown
to anyone living outside of Poland,
but to Marcin and his generation,
it was one of the most important pieces of literature
in their life.
- But we really signed the Polish Lord of the Rings,
and we couldn't believe that.
I still remember, because I was,
during my high school times and at the university,
I was totally into science fiction and fantasy.
Sapkowski comes with the first story, it's about the striga,
and I read it in the Science Fiction Monthly,
and then he publishes books, and, you know,
it's a cult thing.
For my generation,
it's totally the best thing we've ever read.
Actually, we never really thought about it
as a monetary value, so like,
"Hey, we signed it for this amount of money."
It was never, like, a part of our calculation.
We had a chance to build a game
on something we were totally passionate about,
and that was the most important part.
So, like, obviously if the price that would be so high
that we wouldn't be able to afford it,
we just wouldn't sign it, but it was
it was really totally
not a commercial calculation, and then, you know,
we spent five years dealing with the first games,
you can say, yeah,
we could say we are very naive by signing it,
and thinking that we'll deliver a game on it,
and we were, actually.
- [Danny] The first year of development was difficult.
They worked on a tech demo,
and flew to 10 meetings all around Europe
to try and secure a publisher.
Of those 10, only two replied,
and both told them they should maybe try a little harder.
They knew they needed to work on the engine,
but couldn't come to an agreement
on the direction of the technology
with Zielinski and his team in the city of Lodz,
so Marcin decided to take production in house
under the name CD Projekt RED.
They offered jobs in Warsaw
to the other members of that team.
They all agreed.
One of them was a graphic designer called Adam,
who's now head of the studio.
- We always wanted to combine the story with the open world,
and in the Witcher one, we wanted to do this,
and the second level is like
the most open level in the game,
and this is the direction that we wanted to go, to follow.
Technology didn't allow us to do it,
but we always wanted to combine these two things.
It's like magical thinking, very optimistic thinking,
but the Witcher one established this direction.
- [Danny] CD Projekt had big ideas
about the game they wanted to create,
but they needed an engine, so at the next E3,
they approached their friends at BioWare
about licensing the Neverwinter Nights engine.
To their surprise, BioWare agreed,
and so the team went on to work on the Witcher.
A year later, before the following E3,
they flew to Edmonton to show the doctors their game.
- We arrive, and the demo doesn't work,
and then overnight they download some deals,
and it's super stressful,
and even in the morning it works poorly,
but for the meeting, magically, it does,
and then we come into the meeting, and, you know,
super friendly people, not a publisher, nothing like
there is no, like, that will cancel the agreement.
It's more, again, ambition,
and what they will think about us,
and you talk to the RPG gods,
and they will rule on your demo if it's good or not,
so imagine the amount of stress, yes?
And they say they like it,
and so
we have this
they grant us this corner at their booth, and I'm
I said it many times,
but I'm really grateful until today about that, because
this was like putting a bio or a seal of quality
on CD Projekt RED.
Really, honestly, that's what it was,
because they were showing Jade Empire at that time.
The first Xbox-exclusive Jade Empire,
so all the media are like,
all the giant games are Xbox,
and we are like, you know,
like a tiny little mosquito from Poland,
and Gamer was like, "Oh, Jade Empire this, Jade Empire that,
"and by the way, we have these pretty cool guys
"here from Poland, and they have this game called Witcher.
"Take a look."
And we had all these guys coming in, and they mention us.
They write about the game, incredible stuff.
And we sit in this pub with Greg,
he's asking us about the staffing plan.
We didn't have HR at all,
and already we saw that BioWare had, like, a strong HR,
but we were on the, "Pssh, why the hell?
"Why do you need that?
"Makes no sense.
"We can do it ourselves."
We were, so initially we thought, we'll finish the game.
Actually in the original design,
it was like we'll finish in 20 people, whatever, you know,
blah, blah, but you don't know it.
People tell you that, many times,
and you're like, "Ha, come on.
"We're Polish people, work harder." (laughs)
Shit, not five times harder,
maybe, you know, one and a half maybe.
And he's telling me, "You know, Marcin,
"what you see today is just the tip of an iceberg,
"and there is a whole huge part of it
"underneath the surface,"
and yeah, I understood his words,
probably only a few years later, really,
because Witcher 1, we finished in 80, 80-something.
- [Danny] To finish this game,
CD Projekt were going to have to become
a real games development studio,
scaling up and working on the project full-time,
but if they thought the work had been hard
up until this point,
they had no idea how difficult it was about to get.
In our next video, we tell the story
of how these games were made,
and reminisce over the developers' favorite moments
from the Witcher 1 and the Witcher 2.
Throughout the rest of this series,
we're gonna talk to the folks
behind the design of the Witcher franchise.
We're gonna explore the creation of its various worlds,
how combat changed throughout the series,
things like music, quests,
and how the game has been adapted and localized
for people all around the world to enjoy it.
Hello friends, we're shooting B-roll.
There are pigeons and lots of tourists.
Way more tourists than the last time I was here.
So that's
that's fun.
How you doin'?
I'm getting sunburned again,
for the second time in two weeks.
(beeping)
(keyboard typing)
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