Andrzej Sapkowski is quite the renaissance man. He studied economics in college, and knows 20 languages. However, the world primarily knows him as the author behind The Witcher book series, a Polish 1990s low fantasy series that itself became famous thanks to the video game franchise based on it, and after that, the two television series.
So it may surprise you to learn that Sapkowski has not played any of the The Witcher video games by his fellow Polish game developers over at CD Projekt RED. As reported by Tech4Gamers, Sapkowski gave a curt answer when asked about this:
“Never. I have no time for this, and it’s not entertainment for me.”
Sapkowski went on to say that he doesn’t find video games interesting, and he isn’t likely to change his opinion. But there’s probably an obvious reason why he would feel that way.
Remember when I said that The Witcher, which certainly looks like it was a fantasy series made in the 1990s, was actually written a whole decade earlier? Sapkowski was born in 1948, while his Poland was still part of the Eastern Bloc. He is 75 in the year 2023, a ripe old age to even begin thinking about playing video games.
Now, of course, this doesn’t mean that elderly people in general would not be interested in video games. Keiko Awaji, a Japanese actress who appeared in Kurosawa’s film Stray Dog and peaked in the 1960s, was a huge Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy fan. She passed away in 2014 at a ripe 80.
In Sapkowski’s case, you still couldn’t fault the guy, because even if video games were an emerging medium in the years that he was writing The Witcher, Sapkowski was a bigger fan of something else; the same fantasy fiction that he made.
In 2001, Sapkowski published an incredible encyclopedia dedicated to the subject, called Manuscript Discovered in a Dragon’s Cave. In it, he wrote at length about the history and tropes of the genre, demonstrating his intimate knowledge of his peers, such as Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, Lewis, Le Guin, Zelazny, and of course, Rowling and R. R. Martin.
But if Sapkowski can’t appreciate the adaptations of his books, that’s perfectly OK. Through the mediums of video games, and also television, the stories of The Witcher found new audiences, outside of his native Poland, all the way around the world. It’s just as valid to enjoy his stories on an RTX 4070 build, as it is on an Android TV, as it is on a secondhand book printed in 1995.
