10 YEARS - The Witcher 3

Celebrating a decade of monster slaying in THE WITCHER 3: WILD HUNT

- Joshua Wolens

Around 20 years ago, CD Projekt founders Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński flew to meet the men they hoped to dethrone—the ‘BioWare doctors’ Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk. Accompanying them was Adam Badowski, today the joint-CEO of CD Projekt RED, who had the task of wowing the then-undisputed kings of RPG-making with a demo for The Witcher that the CDP leadership had tucked under its arm.

“This demo wasn't great,” recalls Badowski in 2025, but back then it didn’t matter in the slightest. CD Projekt had the bulletproof confidence of youth on its side. “Ray and Greg, they asked the question, ‘So, what do you want to achieve?’” Well, wasn’t the answer obvious? “We would like to be the biggest, the best RPG team in the industry,” Badowski remembers answering. “We would like to create the best RPG game ever.”

“So how big is your team?” asked Muzyka and Zeschuk. “Right now it's 15,” replied the gaggle of Witcher devs, “but we're gonna have about 35 people”. The doctors shook their hands and said “We'll call you back.”

MAKING HISTORY

A decade later, CD Projekt RED’s mad zeal had borne fruit. The studio was a phenomenon, and now people flew to visit it for advice (though the good doctors, ever supportive, did end up helping out the fledgling studio with the first Witcher, which ran on BioWare’s own Aurora engine).

It was, of course, all thanks to The Witcher 3, now the flagship of an enormous global franchise. CDPR had made good on its declaration in BioWare's office: its head now hung heavy beneath the RPG crown.

But if the game was always fated to be a studio-altering success, you sure couldn't tell from the start. The earliest days, when