Cyberpunk 2077 Creator Marcin Iwinski: ‘All We Have Is Our Reputation’

The biggest game of the year is off to a rocky start. As Cyberpunk 2077 It came out on December 10, it has polarized audiences. Fans raved about the game’s gorgeous open world and complex storytelling, signed by developer CD Projekt Red, but players also reported serious glitches, leaving the company scrambling to offer fixes. On Friday, Sony announced that it would withdraw the game from its digital stores until the issues were resolved.

A few days before these criticisms surfaced, when I speak to studio co-founder Marcin Iwinski on launch day, he admits feeling stressed. “Games take time, love and passion, like any work of art,” he says. “Our business is long-term. All we have is our reputation. We release games on rare occasions, and each one is like entering a marriage – you’re supposed to deliver. “

However, Iwinski remains jovial during our conversation, peering under a lock of dirty blonde hair in a rare moment of stalemate in the game’s development. The game was already available to players at the time, and the company was tracking internet comments with a fever “bordering on insanity,” before starting work on updates. Iwinski uses this respite to explain how he and his partner Adam Kiciński went from selling pirated CD-ROMs at Warsaw computer fairs to becoming Europe’s most valuable gaming company.

Iwinski grew up in communist Poland in the 1970s and 1980s. “What I remember from these days is the predominant color,” he says. “If you ask me about socialism, it was gray.” He lived in a standard apartment block, but had unusual access to the outside world through his father, a documentary producer who had the rare opportunity to travel abroad. Iwinski, a computer-obsessed teenager, begged his father to bring him a machine from abroad and was rewarded with a ZX Spectrum computer, packed with four games. “I was playing,” he smiles, “and I left.”

There were no computer stores in Poland at the time, so Iwinski searched the game-swapping personal ads on the back of a British magazine to find new titles. He and Kiciński, a schoolmate, skipped classes to play games and began importing new releases from American wholesalers to sell in the semi-legal markets of Warsaw.

In the corporate frenzy that followed the fall of communism, they established their company, CD Projekt, named after the CD-ROMs they marketed. When the couple first visited London in the mid-1990s, they saw a demonstration of the first PlayStation at a Sony trade show. “Going from gray Poland to burgeoning London was an amazing experience,” recalls Iwinski. “Looking at the PlayStation we think: oh my gosh, we have to be a part of this.”

But the couple did not know how to play games. What they knew was the Polish market and how to distribute. They began to make deals to localize games in English to Polish. His first big hit was an RPG. Baldur’s Gate. They went to great lengths on location, hiring famous Polish actors, tied up by Iwinski’s father, to provide the voices. They were contractually bound to sell 3,000 copies, but they sold 18,000 on the first day alone.

CD Projekt demonstrated the potential of the Polish market so completely that international developers began to carry out their localization efforts in-house. The couple had indeed been out of work. But they had other ambitions. They didn’t just want to sell games; they wanted to make them.

As we speak, Iwinski is seen by two figurines on the windowsill behind him. One is Geralt of Rivia, the hero of The Wizard games, a sword hanging from his back. At his side is the infamous Eredin, his main antagonist. These characters are drawn from stories by Andrzej Sapkowski, a fantasy writer known as the Polish Answer to Tolkien, whose books focus on a monster hunter who becomes embroiled in political strife and supernatural intrigue. The works are deeply rooted in Eastern European folklore, with mature, carnal and violent themes. They would later be adapted into a hit Netflix series.

With this story, CD Projekt brought Polish fantasy to the world. Doing the first Sorcerer The game, released in 2007, came with a steep and expensive learning curve, requiring five years to develop with a team of nearly 100. Its 2011 sequel nearly ruined the company, but it was a dramatic improvement over its predecessor. His greatest achievement was in 2015 The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, an epic fantasy with unparalleled depth of character and narrative texture, which immediately catapulted her to the upper echelons of video game greats.

“If you look at other studios, like Rockstar [creators of Grand Theft Auto], for them the key element is the game ”, explains Iwinski. “For us, the key element is history. It is our heart. ” The WizardComplex and flawed characters, like fan-favorite The Bloody Baron, were novelistic constructs that elicited rare levels of empathy in players.

Telling stories that offer meaningful options became the studio’s calling card. Making gamers feel like their decisions matter is a kind of quest for the grail in games. CD Projekt Red (the company’s game production arm) has developed a sophisticated formula for this, including crafting short-term and long-term consequences for player decisions and delivering morally ambiguous stories. “If a grandmother asks for your help and the options are to help her or kill her and burn down her house, that’s not an exciting choice,” says mission director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz wryly.

These lessons from The Wizard were adapted to Cyberpunk 2077, a dramatic departure from her fantasy universe. Based on a tabletop RPG based on a dystopian sci-fi subgenre, the game promised a high-octane story about cybernetic body implants and shady corporations. With an aggressive ad campaign over the past eight years, CD Projekt Red made fans’ anticipation boil, particularly after announcing that Matrix star Keanu Reeves would play the key character Johnny Silverhand. “We had to get someone serious to fit in well,” says Iwinski. “We came up with a very short list, and that list was Keanu Reeves. There was no Plan B. “

CyberpunkDevelopment was challenging, and Covid-19 made finishing the game especially difficult, with producers stuck at home uploading huge files to each other. However, the game has received mostly positive reviews and the company recently announced that it had made a profit on just 8 million pre-orders of the game. However, gamers and critics also criticized the game for its many glitches, from game-breaking glitches to surreal mistakes that made characters appear bald or forced their genitals to stick out of their clothing.

CD Projekt Red is not alone in its buggy winter release: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, another great game of the season, suffers from similar problems. Development under Covid-19 is partly to blame, and these issues should be fixed in the coming months. CD Projekt Red has apologized for the performance of the game on next-gen consoles and offered refunds to dissatisfied gamers. Its reputation, and the value of the stock, took another hit when Sony pulled the game from its digital stores on Friday.

Ambivalent responses to Cyberpunk 2077 show that game public attitudes towards CD Projekt are changing. The company is loved for its independence, dedication, and skill, but the release of this game has proven to be a test. Having positioned themselves in the Major Leagues, CD Projekt now invites different expectations. His aggressive marketing campaign made big promises and the company failed to deliver, releasing an unfinished product priced at $ 60 and disappointing many a formerly loving fan. Though CyberpunkTechnical glitches will eventually be fixed and the company still largely sticks to its admirable values, it can no longer rely on the Polish underdog story that was once so popular with fans.