It’s easy to associate The Witcher with CD Projekt Red, as they arguably put the series on the mainstream map with The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but the franchise has been around for a very long time. In fact, CD Projekt Red wasn’t the first video game developer to have a crack at adapting Andrzej Sapkowski’s work.
Back in the 90s, a developer by the name of Metropolis Software was making a Witcher game, after Adrian Chmielarz asked Sapkowski about potentially making a game during a random convention. Sapkowski agreed, and thus a game based on The Witcher started production all the way back in 1996, over a decade before the release of CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher.
Of course, we know that it never came to fruition, though the reason why was never fully explained. Now, in a new interview with Gaming Bible, Chmielarz has revealed exactly why we never got to see the Metropolis Software version of The Witcher, and he puts it down to “absolute idiocy” more than anything else.
A Witcher Game Was Cancelled In The 90s Due To “Absolute Idiocy”
According to Chmielarz, it was more a case of Metropolis Software stretching itself way too thin on multiple projects. Because of that, the studio was forced to seek funding from a publisher – TopWare Interactive – which allowed them to keep certain projects while scrapping others. It sounds as though TopWare had the final say though, scrapping games it didn’t see that profitable inside Germany.
CD Projekt Red Is All In On The Witcher Trilogy, So Don’t Expect Cyberpunk 2 For At Least Five Years
Cyberpunk fans are used to waiting a long time between announcement and release.
“So from one to four, which is absolute idiocy, but that’s how inexperienced we were back then,” says Chmielarz. “And then we started running out of money, and then we had a publisher that actually allowed us to finish some of these projects and release them, and we just had to decide which thing to cut.”
I wanted to keep The Witcher, not super strongly, but you know, I do love the universe. However, they did not care about it at all. They were from Germany, and they didn’t know about The Witcher, and they didn’t care. And they said, ‘no, no, no, you have a real-time strategy game in the making. This sells in Germany, so we’re good with that.”
So, from what it sounds like, TopWare Interactive was the one that robbed us of an older Witcher game, though I guess it may have been a blessing in disguise. Who knows if CD Projekt Red would have been given the reigns had Metropolis successfully launched their Witcher game, but whatever the case, I’m very glad it does right now.
- Released
-
October 30, 2007
- ESRB
-
m
- Engine
-
Aurora Engine
