The Witcher has become a massive household name. From humble beginnings as a novel series, the franchise has spawned a successful Netflix live-action adaptation and a series of video games from CD Projekt Red. However, before CD Projekt Red had its hands on the IP, another studio was attached to the game. Back in the 1990s, we almost had a very different take on The Witcher games with Metropolis Software.
If you’re unfamiliar with the studio, Metropolis Software was founded in Poland back in the early 1990s. The studio would find some success and even secured a publisher, TopWare. One of the games that the studio was cooking up at the time was an adaptation of Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series. Turns out, acquiring the rights to adapt a game was rather easy with the author at the time. However, that game project would never see the light of day as a full game launch.
The Witcher Developer Explains What Happened
Gaming Bible had the chance to speak with Adrian Chmielarz, who was one of the developers at the time working on Metropolis Software. This was back in the 1990s, when The Witcher didn’t even have an English translation yet. But, Adrian noted that he knew Andrzej Sapkowski as they both frequented similar conventions. When the development team reached out to see if there was any interest in bringing out a video game adaptation, it turned out that the author didn’t care much about what happens outside of his universe. All the author needed was the money to acquire the rights to develop a game.
It was even Metropolis Software that coined the term “The Witcher” for the franchise’s English translation. So while there has been footage of a prototype, the game itself would never be released into the marketplace. The reason was that the studio tried to expand beyond what they could actually handle. Adrian described it as idiocy, as the studio had some success and, rather than trying to double the number of games being developed, they quadrupled it.
So from one to four, which is absolute idiocy, but that’s how inexperienced we were back then. And then we started running out of money, and then we had a publisher [TopWare Interactive] 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 [TopWare] 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. You have a point-and-click adventure, which also sells in Germany. So we’re keeping that.
As a result, the publisher came in and pushed some games to the back burner, including The Witcher. Eventually, CD Projekt Red would come up with the same idea years later. While the Metropolis Software had exclusive rights, they knew the game would never come to fruition, and in the end, they were happy to see how successful the game franchise became.
