Long before CD Projekt Red made a name for itself developing the highly-praised The Witcher series of video games, another developer had already worked on a highly different version of the game back in the 1990s.
Metropolis Software was a Polish game developer that made several PC games between 1993 and 2007 like Gorky 17, The Prince and the Coward, and Katharsis.
It was also set to create a game based on the Wiedźmin stories by Andrzej Sapkowski, better known now as The Witcher, with the project’s origins beginning in 1996.
Adrian Chmielarz, who worked on Metropolis Software’s Witcher game, told GAMINGbible that he was “very proud of being the guy who actually invented the term Witcher,” before the original stories had received an English translation.
As Chmielarz put it, “I knew Andrzej Sapkowski from the sort of sci-fi and fantasy fandom conventions. We had our conventions, and I met the author there. And we drunk a lot of vodka together. And I just called him one day and said, ‘look, I would love to make a game based on your short stories’.
“If anybody knows anything about Mr. Sapkowski, then they know that he doesn’t really care about what happens to his characters outside of his own universe. So he was like, ‘oh, fine, you want to do what, a game? That’s okay. Show me the money and it’s yours.’”
How The Term “Witcher” Was Coined
Chmielarz adds that once the deal was signed, he got in touch with Sapkowski with regards to translating the title in English.
In Poland, the series is known as Wiedźmin, which didn’t have an English translation at the time. The closest word that has an English translation is “Wiedźma”, which is a feminine form of the word “Witch”.
Chmielarz told me that Sapkowski was considering “Hexer” as the English translation. “He said, ‘I was thinking Hexer’ and that totally makes sense. But I was still programming at the time, and hex code was something that I was dealing with every single day, and to me, Hexer did not sound right.
“So I told him, ‘how about The Witcher?’ Because what I had in mind was The Witcher. And he said, ‘actually, that sounds good. I’m okay with that, so let’s go with that.’ So that’s how the term came to be.”
Following this, Metropolis Software was hard at work creating its own version of The Witcher, around ten years before CD Projekt Red would debut what gamers now recognise as The Witcher series.
Although we don’t have a lot of footage from the game, a short playable tech demo was shown off in 2017 by former Metropolis Software developers Kacper Reutt and Jarek Sobierski, which you can view below (via ARHNeu).
Regarding how the game was cancelled, Chmielarz says “It was a typical mistake that smaller studios make when they are successful, where instead of just maybe growing large enough to bake two games, we started making four.
“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.’”
Chmielarz says that “was it” after that, with the project dying “with a whimper without really being officially cancelled.”
The Witcher Would Return Under CD Projekt Red Ten Years Later
In 2002, CD Projekt Red signed a deal with Sapkowski to develop a game based on the series. “I thought to myself, ‘hang on a second, we still have the agreement with him, which is probably valid for exclusivity’, but I didn’t care,” he adds.
“I knew I wouldn’t be able to finish The Witcher, so I said, ‘okay, never mind. I hope they make a great game.’ And I’m super happy that they did, because I love these worlds. I love what they’ve done. They’ve done a much better game. Done what we would have done with the title, so it all worked out in the end, but yeah, that’s the backstory. That’s the story of The Witcher.”
After leaving Metropolis Software, Chmielarz founded People Can Fly in 2002, working on titles like Painkiller, Gears of War, and Bulletstorm. Ten years later, he left the studio and formed his own independent developer, The Astronauts.
The Astronauts developed and published its first game, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, in 2014. Since then, Chmielarz and his team have been working on Witchfire, a first-person horror and fantasy shooter with roguelike elements. The game has been in early access since 2023, and is targeting a full release sometime this year.
As for whether he would return to the world of The Witcher if given the chance, Chmielarz said: “Maybe. I genuinely don’t know. I say maybe, because I do love this universe, but I don’t know if you have a franchise like that, if you are able to give this much freedom to somebody else.
“But yeah, I don’t mind working on a property as such. That’s why I enjoyed most of my time on Gears of War Judgment. I absolutely love Gears, I was a Gearhead, and I had no problem working on that. So, yeah, it wouldn’t be a problem to work on The Witcher too.”
