CD Projekt Red is a video game developer that used to have a stellar reputation. That is, until, Cyberpunk 2077 came out. It turns out that the gaming company everybody believed was different from the other triple-A studios is actually far from perfect.
Be that as it may, a gaming company as big and as popular as CD Projekt Red had to begin somewhere. With the rise or demise of the reputable video game company, it is interesting to take a look back at CD Projekt Red's history. How was the studio able to get to where it is today?
10 Started By Video Game Retailers
CD Projekt (minus the "Red" at the time) was founded by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński. Before the company even thought of developing games, CD Projekt used to be a retailer, acting as a distributor of foreign games in Poland.
Before becoming a legitimate business, Iwiński sold cracked copies of games. Kiciński was doing the same thing as well. They wanted to legitimize their venture so they started CD Projekt in May of 1994, with only $2,000 as their capital, with their friend's flat as their office.
9 CD Projekt Vs Piracy
Before CD Projekt was a legitimate business, Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński sold cracked copies of video games. Ironically, their biggest challenge when they founded their company was overcoming video game piracy.
Early on, most of the pair's products were sold with the help of mom-and-pop shops, which were famous in Poland at the time. Both Iwiński and Kiciński knew that if they were to overcome video game piracy, they had to localize games and make their products more appealing than pirated copies.
8 Ace Ventura Helped CD Projekt Become Successful
The company planned to localize games in order to finally get rid of video game piracy in Poland. They enacted this plan in 1996 when they began working with successful developers at the time such as Seven Stars and Leryx-LongSoft. However, things wouldn't become too successful for them until a year later.
One of CD Projekt's most successful localization titles early on was Ace Ventura.: The CD-Rom Game, an Ace Ventura game that's based on the animated series. CD Projekt's prior localized titles only sold in the hundreds, but Ace Venture sold thousands.
7 Baldur's Gate
With CD Projekt having succeeded in localizing games, they wanted to expand their horizons and move forward. They reached out to BioWare and Interplay Entertainment, massive names in the video game industry.
The studios had been working on a game called Baldur's Gate at the time and CD Projekt believed the RPG would be successful in Poland. They added items to the packaging in order to make the game more appealing to local gamers and even hired famous Polish actors to voice the characters.
6 Their First Game
CD Projekt was supposed to develop the PC port for Baldur Gate's sequel. Unfortunately, the game got canceled six months after development began. During this time, CD Projekt had already started working on the game's codes. They ended up using this code to create their very first title.
The company wanted to develop a video game based on The Witcher books, which were incredibly popular in Poland at the time. They acquired the rights to the franchise in 2002 despite having no idea how to develop a video game. The Witcher ended up being successful commercially and critically.
5 Close To Bankruptcy
Looking back at CD Projekt Red's history prior to the release of Cyberpunk 2077, it seemed like the company could do no wrong and everything it did always bore success. However, this was not the case when they opted to port the first Witcher game to consoles.
The console version of the game would have been called The Witcher: The White Wolf and would be developed by French studio Widescreen Games. The relationship and communication between the two studios did not go so smoothly, however, and the project was canceled instead. This set back cost CD Projekt Red so much it almost caused them to face bankruptcy. The success of The Witcher 2 was the reason the company managed to stay afloat.
4 CD Projekt Started GOG.com
GOG, or Good Old Games, was founded by CD Projekt in 2008. The company hoped to provide players with DRM-free versions of games, meaning these games would be stripped off of any digital rights and the player would have the freedom to control and modify the game at their leisure.
GOG was mainly made for classic games, which had become difficult to search for prior to the digital age. The platform garnered more traction after CD Projekt managed to acquire the support of the successful and popular video game studio Ubisoft.
3 Developing The Wild Hunt
The development of The Witcher 3 was CD Projekt Red's most herculean endeavor up to then. As players now know, the scales of the previous two entries in the series are nowhere near as massive as The Witcher 3, which was the studio's plan from the get-go.
The game took less than four years to develop, which is highly impressive for games of that size. However, during this time, the team behind The Witcher 3 allegedly had to crunch for over a year just to meet deadlines. The Witcher 3 reportedly had a total of more than one million lines of code.
2 EA Buyout Rumor
A couple of years ago, there was a rumor circulating around the web that Electronic Arts was in the process of buying out CD Projekt Red. Those familiar with EA acquisitions found this news highly alarming, as the company had the habit of acquiring up-and-coming, successful studios only to close them after a couple of years later.
Thankfully, all of this was nothing more than what was reported: a rumor. CD Projekt Red even went as far as saying that a deal with a publisher as large as EA would go against the studio's philosophy.
1 Cyberpunk 2077
After the success of The Witcher franchise, the studio wanted to move away from Geralt's story and do something else. The studio was a massive fan of cyberpunk media such as the Blade Runner movies and the cyberpunk tabletop games, so they created a game in ode to the genre: the game we now know as Cyberpunk 2077.
They acquired the rights to the tabletop RPG. Development of the game's concept began in 2012, even before The Witcher 3 was finished. The studio, however, decided to finish The Witcher 3 first before finally moving towards Cyberpunk 2077, so the game's pre-production started in 2016. From early development to release, Cyberpunk 2077 was in the works for about nine years.