The Amazing Story of CD Projekt. From pirated programs to respect around the world. [Translation]

I went to Poland, to Warsaw, to stay with CD Projekt, at the famous home of The Witcher. There is one thing I want to say: I will never stop thinking that The Witcher 2 was so sterile (almost perfect) but the company that made it almost died.

In 2009, two years after the release of The Witcher. Then the global economic crisis brought CD Projekt to its knees. Money from the first game ate up efforts to develop The Witcher: White Wolf, a console game that the world never saw. At the same time, CD Projekt’s publishing business became a huge money-sucking black hole. And GOG was hardly popular enough to support the studio’s existence.

It was the most terrible period in Marcin Iwiński’s entire twenty-year career. “The company is my child, my first child,” he said, “Then I already had a daughter and a son. And I realized what I could lose".

Instead of gathering his thoughts and getting down to business, after the release of The Witcher, CD Projekt began to rapidly fall down. “The prospects looked pretty bleak back then. We were all on edge. It was a terrible year, we were forced to scrape by our bootstraps to pay salaries at the end of the month.”.

This is not what I expected and, especially not what I saw in front of me now: Iwinski in plush, in a hefty leather chair, in the center of a cool office, stylized with fashionable brickwork, glass partitions and ventilation ducts, which now employs about two hundred people. There is also a motion capture studio, a shining bright red toilet, armor, swords, awards and even a vegan canteen. And around me is an army working on The Witcher 3 – a game so prestigious that even Microsoft showed off it during the XBOX One presentation at E3.

And all this almost… disappeared? “Those few months were full of horror,” says Iwinski. “I don’t know what happened, but one day I told myself, if this doesn’t work, then I’ll do something else, at the very least, restructure the company. And then the daily stress disappeared, and I had new strength to create.”.

“I don’t know why this happened, it sounds very Buddhist, but there was something else: as long as I was emotionally involved, I was paralyzed. We understood one thing: people can make mistakes, yes, but we must learn from their mistakes, and not repeat them.".

CD Projekt survives thanks to a life-saving reverse takeover. The company was listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. But three months later, investors began lining up. “It defies logic, but that’s how it works.”.

This Polish stronghold of gaming history has overcome all obstacles and soared upward again. With just two games and a console port, CD Projekt has grown from a small, little-known studio to a giant capable of fighting back. But once upon a time there was nothing. There was only a boy, Marcin Iwinski, living in the “jungle of Eastern Europe,” as he himself calls Poland.

He loved games and still does, but when he was a boy he couldn’t afford to buy them. The shadow of Soviet Russia and socialism still loomed on the horizon. Many couldn’t afford the amazing computers Western players used to play on. And people who did not travel outside of East Germany could only dream about them. But Marcin’s father, who was then making documentaries, was able to travel, and as a result, Marcin got a Spectrum Sinclair computer, which introduced him to 10 PRINT “Hello.”.

“Many people reproach me, “My God, you were a pirate – you came out of illegal computer markets, ah-ah-ah!”. To which I answer: “Firstly, it was not illegal and, secondly, look at the directors, founders and shareholders of the main IT companies in Poland. Who are these guys?""– Marcin Iwiński

He craved games, but there were no stores selling them. Fortunately, there was no copyright law in Poland at that time either. So in large cities computer markets opened on weekends, where games and programs were sold second-hand. “Yes, it was illegal,” he shrugs, but there was no other alternative, so he had to turn a blind eye to it.

He took the first steps towards his future career when he wrote a letter in broken English to a Greek whose address he found in the swap section of his used computer. He asked to copy new games onto a blank cassette and within two weeks he received them. “I was incredibly happy. Arriving at a computer collapse, I became a star. I brought new releases that no one else had,” he said. “I still remember one of them – Renegade. It was a great game".

Then two important circumstances played a role. First, Iwinski failed a qualifying test for a computer course he wanted to take in high school, which led him to a physics class where he met his business partner for the following years, Michal Kiciński, who was selling games for Atari at the time. They hit it off immediately, "playing a lot of games and skipping school a lot".

The second important thing was the advent of CD-ROM. “People who didn’t see it don’t remember how revolutionary it was… After all, what is Blu-ray?", laughs Iwinski. “When a CD contained about 400 floppy disks; it completely changed the game".

Through small wholesalers in America, they imported games into Poland to sell them and be the first to play games like Mad Dog McCree or 7th Guest. The beginnings of a business appeared. “We went to the tax office, knocked on the door and said: “Hey, we want to start a company, what do we need to do?”?»

The company with the self-explanatory name CD Projekt was founded in 1994. Marcin Iwinski was twenty years old. Between the two of them, the young entrepreneurs had two thousand bucks and a computer, the first office was a simple room in an apartment that a friend provided them for free. There were so many flights of stairs that people who came to the meeting said: “You’re in a real, uh-fuh (catching your breath) ass.”.

“It’s funny,” adds Iwinski: “In Poland people often ask me, ‘Oh, so you were a pirate – your roots are in the computer games market?”, and I answer “Firstly, it was not illegal and, secondly, look at the directors, founders and shareholders of the main IT companies in Poland. Who are these guys? These are the guys who made their first connections in the computer markets.»

It’s certainly not where they came from, but those computer markets became a critical part of a set of values ​​that will serve CD Projekt for years to come. Work is currently underway on The Witcher 3, which is putting everyone’s attention on CD Projekt, but it’s not blind adoration. Everyone understands how CD Projekt does business. The company opposes DRM, while others insist on it. The company distributes additional content for free, while others charge money for it. They respect their audience and don’t see them as cash cows. All this is due to the way the company developed.

“Our main competitors here in Poland have always been pirates,” says Iwinski. The National Stadium in Warsaw, rebuilt after being destroyed during World War II and recently rebuilt, is home to the largest flea market in Eastern Europe, a major exporter of counterfeit goods, games and music. “It was even possible,” he says with a smile, “to buy a grenade launcher.”. Here you could buy fifteen pound games for three pounds within hours of release. “Pretty tough competition,” he shrugs, there was little that could be done to stop it.

But what if he can convince people to buy licensed copies instead of pirated ones?? He got an idea. “We got involved in the game in a big way that day: we signed a contract for the localization of Baldur’s Gate”

He knew that the game would be popular in Poland because it was cool. And he took on its localization, which no one was doing at that time, strange, because most people in schools studied Russian, not English.

And the best thing is that Baldur’s Gate came out on five discs, so even pirates wouldn’t sell it for three pounds.

We spent thirty thousand pounds to license three thousand copies from Interplay, the localization itself cost us the same amount. Then there was marketing, production and the best part – hiring famous Polish actors to voice some roles in the game – to increase popularity. “A lot of money was invested in this project,” he shudders, remembering, “The whole company counted on success.»

Baldur’s Gate cost thirty pounds, it was very expensive for Poland, so CD Projekt put the amount at fifteen pounds. But inside the box was everything a pirated copy couldn’t provide: parchment cards sealed with wax, a locally produced D&D rulebook, and a soundtrack disc. The lowest price pirates could sell five discs for was fifteen pounds. Iwinski hoped that people would be willing to pay even more to get additional materials.

“Our core policy is no DRM and we will never change it.”– Marcin Iwiński

And now, three months before the release, the number of orders exceeded expectations. Five thousand turned into six thousand, then seven, then eight. “We served not only retail outlets in Poland, there were also orders from wholesalers, small local shops, computer markets. We had to take out an additional warehouse to cope, because our office was filled to capacity with five thousand copies.»

"We sent out eighteen nongamstopcasinosites.co.uk thousand copies that day."It was a success that opened the door for CD Projekt into the world of big business. It was a lesson that is difficult to overestimate.

Today, GOG is no longer trying to prevent online piracy the way CD Projekt did to prevent piracy in computer markets years earlier. But GOG adds value to the game by doing all the heavy lifting, sourcing and refining games, providing technical support, and integrating guides, soundtracks, training, and providing great deals. No obligation. “Our core policy is no DRM and we will never change it.»

Iviniski adds: “People have stupid ideas but they can’t execute them correctly, and that’s why pirates are successful.”. It works, it’s freedom. And it’s good that freedom comes first. But people want to pay for games and Steam has proven it, we have proven it. The real driving force behind success is the ability to listen to the desires of gamers, understand what they want, and give it to them.»

Five years after opening, GOG is visited by two million gamers monthly and annual turnover has doubled. All this money came from the successful relaunch of an online distribution business called CD Projekt Blue, which was spun off from CD Projekt Red’s main game development division.

“The desire was there from the very beginning,” says Iwinski about creating games. When he was younger, he tried to create on the Amiga, and now he says with a laugh: “I’m a shitty programmer.”. But we really wanted to make our own game.»

Baldur’s Gate was part of the journey and at the same time a super adventure in the Polish publishing industry. Adding to the hassle was the fact that, on the one hand, chain stores appeared and closed, and on the other, publishers. Iwinski and Kicinski looked in the mirror and asked themselves: “Hey, do we really want to remain mere middlemen??»

They needed a boost, which was given to them by the famous games of Fergus Urquhart (Obsidian) and Dave Perry (Gaikai), who worked at Interplay at the time. They wanted CD Projekt to bring Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance to Poland, but it was a console game, and the Poles still played on PC. The game wouldn’t sell. "Why don’t you recycle it??"asked from Interplay. “Yes,” said our Polish heroes. "We’ll try!»

The person they thought could handle the project was Sebastian Zieliński – one of the best Polish developers of the time, the man responsible for the remake of Wolfenstein, called Mortyr 2093-1944 – the game sold throughout Poland and was extremely popular. He led the project, but there was also a second key collaborator, a production designer named Adam Badowski, who became a real find. Now he is the head of CD Projekt RED studio.

The development kit for the PlayStation 2 was smuggled from Interplay’s London office to Poland and work on the PC version of Dark Alliance began to boil. But then Interplay called and canceled the deal. “But we’ve already caught the courage,” says Iwinski. They wanted to make a game, but what could they do??

There is no more famous fantasy story in Poland, a country with a rich medieval history, than Wiedzmin (veedj-min) or The Witcher as we know it (it’s an adaptation made by CD Projekt). The books were written by Andrzej Sapkowski – a man far from video games, but with such a wonderful imagination that he was nicknamed the “Polish Tolkien”. “He means a lot to us,” Iwinski emphasizes. "He’s in a completely different league. If you say: Sapkowski, it means the highest class, nothing less.”

He was so unattainable that Iwinski did not even consider the possibility of transferring the right to create the game. But they were able to wrest this right from the clutches of the Polish studio-developer of mobile games, which would not even develop the story. “We contacted Sapkowski and asked: “We heard that the development of the game is at a standstill, can we talk?"Sapkowski is a writer, not a businessman, and it turned out that he does not understand what is happening. "I’ll let you know," he said. This is true. The developers said that the mobile game is not being developed. “Okay, make me an offer,” he replied. “There was no question of a large sum,” recalls Iwinski, but it worked. “We got the rights and that’s when the real problems started, because we had to make a game, but we had no idea how. »

Protection against “horse armor”*.

Marcin Iwinski entrusted the management of his studio to Adam Badowski. He must protect the company from greed, ensure that the White Wolf’s mistakes are not repeated, and protect against "Evil Forces" such as publishers selling horse armor. “You laugh,” he says, “but I constantly come across such proposals from external campaigns. They, like the tempting Serpent, whisper to us promises of wealth that can be spent on “this” and “that”. Something similar happened recently, but unfortunately he can’t talk about it. But Marcin rejected the offer, citing the fact that he did not know how to explain himself to the players later. “Ummm, hmmm, yes,” they faltered. “So we agreed,” he said. "You know the answer, thank you.»

First things first, we formed a studio. Sebastian Zielinski’s team split into CD Projekt RED, their office was located 120 kilometers south of the Warsaw office, in the city of Lodz. Due to the distance, Iwinski and Kicinski could not visit there often. But under Zielinski’s supervision, CD Projekt RED created a demo within a year. “It was a piece of crap,” chuckles Adam Badowski. “We tried to convince Marcin and Michel not to go to the first meeting with the demo, but they decided. »

… show "It" to publishers across Europe on the most expensive and powerful laptops money can buy. “After two weeks of meetings, we receive two emails that say in plain English: “This is not good,” which meant: “Boys, go home.”. We were crushed. We thought: "Oh God, we’re in shit.»

Sebastian Zielinski stayed with us until the release of the first Witcher demo. “One day I came with one of the guys to our office in Lodz. We had previously warned Zielinski that we were going to move everything to Warsaw and close this office, he said: “I’m not interested.”."We offered everyone a job and everyone agreed. We ordered a cargo taxi, loaded all the equipment and transported it to Warsaw on the same day. We put it in the warehouse."It’s still lying there.

Mikel Kicinski took over the development, and BioWare helped with the engine (Aurora). Iwinski was friends with Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka, and BioWare even went so far as to offer space for their demo at their E3 booth. BioWare did everything possible to ensure that The Witcher did not go unnoticed in the queue for 2004’s Jade Empire. Ironically, this happened just as BioWare announced Dragon Age, which would go head-to-head with The Witcher – only this time on equal terms.

The Witcher was initially developed by 15 people, but ended up with 100 people working on it over five years and costing an unprecedented 20 million Polish gold (Equivalent to approximately 12-16 million pounds sterling). Moreover, adds Iwinski: “It was all our money. Plus, external infusions.»

There were no game developers in Poland to join the team, and CD Projekt RED didn’t have the international connections to attract people from other countries, so bankers, doctors and people from all walks of life, united by a passion for games and a desire to try something new, were brought together. But, like CD Projekt RED, they didn’t know what to do – they learned as they went.

Ideas got out of control as the team tried to create something as complex as Baldur’s Gate with the epicness of The Witcher book. The game was cut two or three times, but still, in the end it turned out to be a hundred hours of gameplay. “It just shows that if we hadn’t cut it. " "What?", I note, "it would be bigger than Skyrim?“No,” he laughs, “most likely we would have gone out of business.”.»

Atari turned out to be the publisher with the best terms (Although Codemasters and Koch were also considered) and CD Projekt RED chose them. “For about six months we worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” recalls chief character designer Paweł Mielniczuk. And Adam Badowski slept under the table. “For three days in the same clothes. Those were stinking days,” he laughs.

“The game was a complete mess,” Mielnitzuk continues, “and it was only at the very end that everything fell into place. In fact, we were all surprised that we managed to put the game together from disparate pieces.“As a result, CD Projekt RED were able to put together a game out of nothing. And in 2007, The Witcher was released.

Immediately after the release of The Witcher, work began on a sequel using the Aurora engine. Development continued until a techno demo leaked onto the Internet.

“If you are a fan of fully realistic environments, realistic social interactions and full-blooded fantasy storytelling, then you are welcome,” we wrote then, “The Witcher has a lot to offer you.”

It wasn’t a masterpiece, but it showed good promise and the game was received warmly enough critically and commercially (the game has sold over two million times to date) to warrant a sequel. Now CD Projekt got down to business deliberately.

Following the release of The Witcher’s Deluxe Edition (which was released as a free patch for anyone who bought the original, just like The Witcher 2), work began on both The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3 simultaneously.

The Witcher 3 was a background project to create an engine that would work with consoles, since BioWare didn’t do it in the Aurora Engine, and consoles have always been an attractive platform for CD Projekt RED. The plan was to switch to it after The Witcher 2.

The Witcher 2 was once again powered by Aurora, and again he only visited the PC, but he only got to the tech demo, which Adam Badowski thought in those days “looked amazing.”."Suddenly there was a leak, and it can be assessed in the article (just below). "We had a lot of leaks!", laughs Badowski.

That’s all The Witcher got on Auror, because then the big bad The Witcher: Wight Wolf showed up, huffing and puffing and ruining all the plans.

“I’m still ashamed that we burned a lot of money back then – our money.»– Marcin Iwiński

White Wolf was supposed to be the console version of The Witcher, it was Atari’s idea. Iwinski saw the benefit that the brand would appear on consoles before the next part. Therefore, after some negotiations, he agreed – a mistake, but how could he know that then?

CD Projekt RED did not have the internal resources to fully develop White Wolf, so the French studio Widescreen Games acquired the right to develop CD Projekt RED wanted to control the process, so Atari financed the development.

Five months later, problems began and CD Projekt sent a dozen developers to the French studio to help. Further – more. Iwinski began to suspect that the developers at Widescreen were not fully committed to the project. Adam Badowski had to fly to the studio’s aid to create a piece of the game to be shown at the Atari conference in Leon, which received a storm of applause and shouts of "bravo"!». But after a couple of weeks another problem arose and Widescreen decided to roll back the game 4-5 months ago.

“I won’t talk about tension and stupid discussions on the phone, “it’s your fault” and.T.d. The thing is, we realized that they didn’t have the slightest idea how to make a game.» Every month, more money was spent on Widescreen Games than on CD Projekt RED in Poland. It’s time to make important decisions.

“After five days of proceedings, in the evening we gathered in the Lyon cafe, there were 5-6 of us, the question was asked: “So what do you think?”?"The answers were one worse than the other. Someone suggested that Widescreen would require another 30 people and a year to complete White Wolf. Finally someone said, "Hey, let’s put off development and make another game, it’ll be easier than working with them."."We agreed. “The next day we told Atari that we were abandoning this idea.”

Atari didn’t like this and none other than Big Phil Harrison (who worked at Sony, now at Microsoft, and started his career at Atari) flew to France to listen to both sides of the conflict. Iwinski remembers the meeting. “We sat on one side of the table, Widescreen on the other, and Phil (he says with an accent) in the middle and we started arguing – they blamed us, and we blamed them.”

Harrison took Iwinski and Kichiski aside. "He said a very British thing, (imitates accent) Looks like we’re in real shit."We replied: "Yes, Phil, unfortunately, we screwed up"

“I was ashamed that we then burned a lot of money – our money. And when I contacted Phil again, he told me that he was very sorry, but they were sending a legal notice to return the money invested in us.»

Iwinski flew to New York for negotiations, which ended with the signing of an agreement on the transfer of rights to distribute The Witcher 2 in North America. Atari said, "This is to pay off White Wolf’s debts."

In May 2009, CD Projekt RED confirmed that work on The Witcher: White Wolf had been suspended. In fact, everything was thrown into the trash – none of the developments were used. “We wasted so much time,” Iwinski lamented.

CD Projekt RED took The Witcher 3 apart and used its engine to create The Witcher 2. But the engine was not finished. So, at first, the development of The Witcher was carried out blindly, without prototypes and tests. And then the global economic crisis brought CD Projekt RED to its knees, becoming the worst moment in Marcin Iwinski’s career.

What is most surprising: during this period of constant stress, Iwinski still refused to take the easy route and sign deals with publishers, jeopardizing what he valued most – creative freedom. The first The Witcher took only 6 months to sign an agreement with Atari, which turned out to be a mistake. Other start-up studios would have caved in, but Iwinski didn’t give up. And today The Witcher 3 is fully funded by CD Projekt. “We are almost completely self-sufficient”

The Witcher 2 took half the time to catch up and surpass its predecessor, despite being just as ambitious and built on a completely different engine. The initial location, called "Valley of Flowers", was cut, despite the fact that it contained an "amazing plot layer". “This is not a girls’ place,” Adam Badowski quickly adds: “This is the land of the elves."And the elves in the world of The Witcher are just as dirty and disgusting as everything else. The third act of the game was also cut short because the team ran out of time.

Released in May 2011, the addon brought a lot of changes to The Witcher and The Witcher 2, bringing CD Projekt to the big league. “It just didn’t have any rivals that came close to it in terms of balance, character development, and plot,” we wrote at the time, “or in the way it treats you not like a player to be led by the hand, but like an adult, giving you room to make mistakes, to empathize with a story where not everyone gets their due.»

Best of all, the studio managed to achieve this with its own RED Engine, which could finally live up to the company’s ambitions for consoles. A year later, on the Xbox 360 (the studio simply doesn’t know how to port the game to the PlayStation 3), with the release of the extended edition of The Witcher 2, a technical triumph came, considering what the studio managed to cram into it.

In the spring of 2012, another difficult decision loomed before us: “What are we going to do with the next gene?”?"After this, some more time passed before it became known for sure that these consoles would appear.

“We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we wanted the next game to be open world, a huge game. This is exactly what people expect from a game released by CD Projekt RED, an RPG with a great story that will blow your mind with its design and graphics. And the past generation is simply not suitable for this,” says Iwinski. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have sacrificed so much and made another game, like The Witcher 2.5, but it won’t happen.»

"Looking back, it was a very brave decision because a lot of studios would have said, ‘No!"Looking at it from a purely commercial point of view, it was much better to release the game on all five platforms. But we didn’t want that, it would have been a different game; it wouldn’t be "that" game.»

CD Projekt RED has once again set the bar high by tackling multiplatform development for the first time and attempting to create an open world whose size should not be underestimated. The little bits of the game that were shown to us look promising. However, it is too early to evaluate everything as a whole based on small grains. There are still a lot of things that need to be improved. How many? “I don’t know,” Badowski blurted out. “This is a simple question of a very general nature. We have design documents for everything, but the game is still not 90 percent finished. It’s not finished at all, but the entire storyline has already been written and implemented. So it’s hard to say.»

The team is currently working on a "very important deadline", a new aspect of the gameplay that will be shown to the press and then the public. Planned for this year, although this is not fully known.

When will The Witcher 3 be released?? This is a big secret, although I wouldn’t expect it until the second half of 2014.

Whenever it comes out, The Witcher 3 will mark the end of an era for CD Projekt RED, the end of more than a decade of exploitation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s world (What will happen next, excluding Cyberpunk 2077, no one knows). This should cement CD Projekt’s position as the "cool guy" of the gaming industry, and The Witcher will be remembered for many years to come as their rise to greatness and the limelight. But we must be aware that the light can be as harsh as it is blindingly bright. There will be no more concessions, CD Projekt will begin to feel public pressure.

But it will have to wait, because next year Macin Iwiński will turn 40 and 20 years will have passed since the start of the CD Projekt adventure. Since he started trading games by hand, he has managed to do a lot. But he did not go this route alone, he tries his best to emphasize that in all difficult situations he was helped by Mikol Kicinski, or his brother Adam Kicinski, or Piotr Nielubowicz, or Adam Badowski. Without them and many others, he would not be sitting in front of me now in blue jeans, a sweatshirt, with a relaxed smile on his stubbled face, in a company that continues to serve as an example not only for Poland, but for the whole world.

“I’m very proud,” he says, “the biggest success is that we work with the most talented people. I can say that we started a family here.»

“There are, of course, difficult moments, where without them. But still, it’s a unique atmosphere and as long as it exists, as long as we love games and as long as we enthusiastically discuss what we play, what we’ve seen, what we’ve read that’s funny, and not just doing our daily routine, it all makes sense.”