$4,000 is all it took to acquire rights to make a Witcher game in the '90s
Before CD Projekt Red decided to make their own Witcher game, Metropolis Software gave it a shot on their own. Now we know how much the studio had to pay Andrzej Sapkowski to be able to do that.
As some of you may already know, The Witcher series made by CD Projekt Red is not the first attempt at making a game in the world created by Andrzej Sapkowski. Before CDP even thought about it, there was another Polish studio – Metropolis Software – that wanted to make a Witcher game. The only thing we have from those days is a few screenshots from the prototype version of the game. However, there’s one more interesting piece of information that has just been revealed – we now know how much Metropolis had to pay Andrzej Sapkowski to acquire the rights to make that game.
Adrian Chmielarz – one of the most famous game developers from Poland – revealed that Metropolis Software paid PLN 15,000 (which today amounts to roughly $ 4,000) for the rights to make the game. According to Marcin Kosman, the author of a book “Not only The Witcher – the history of Polish computer games”, who attended Chmielarz’s panel at Pixel Connect in Warsaw, that amount may not be 100% correct as Chmielarz mentioned this using the word “roughly” or “probably”. It’s safe to assume, though, that even if this is not a precise number, it is pretty close to the actual one.
Although that number may seem unusually small to all of you, it is worth mentioning that PLN 15,000 in 1998 was a year’s worth of average salary in Poland. At that point Sapkowski didn’t even finish his Witcher saga – Lady of the Lake came out in 1999, the movie with Michal Zebrowski as Geralt came out 2 years later and the TV series (that many fans consider to be a monstrosity) was first screened in September 2002. Basically, it was almost 20 years before the world got The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that we all fell in love with, which means that the popularity of Sapkowski’s works was not even close to its peak. During his panel at Pixel Connect, Chmielarz also mentioned that Grzegorz Miechowski (co-founder of Metropolis Software, now working in 11 bit studios) believed that such an amount of money was still too high at that time.
Of course we have no idea how much CD Projekt Red paid for the rights to the game many years later, but as Andrzej Sapkowski said himself, he wishes he did a different thing – settled for royalties instead of taking an upfront payment.
If you want to read a bit more about The Witcher that Metropolis Software was doing in the eighties, make sure to check out our article Many faces of Geralt – 10 things about The Witcher franchise you probably didn’t know.
