A new video of 90’s canned Witcher video game emerges, showing off the title for the very first time.
Before CD Projekt Red took a crack at The Witcher back in the 2000’s, a Polish studio by the name of Metropolish Software gave it a go in 1997. The game’s development was headed by Adam Chmielarz, former co-owner and creative director of People Can Fly whose credits would go on to include Bulletstorm and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. It was Chmielarz who actually coined the English translation “The Witcher,” from the Polish title of the series Wiedźmin.
The game was set to be a 3D action-adventure game that featured role-playing elements, such as experience points and a morality decision making system (the latter of which was a fairly new concept). Further, it was being pitched as “adult,” which doesn’t seem like a big deal now, but back in 1997, it was.
But the project was soon canned, only getting as far as a first playable chapter and the signing of a publisher in TopWare. According to Chmielarz, the game was cancelled for being too ambitious and for the developer being too overworked with other ongoing protects. Adding to the project’s mystique is the fact that footage of it, and what The Witcher could have been, never once emerged
Previous attempts to recover the data of the game had been made by the aforementioned Chmielarz, but the attempts never yielded any results. It appeared the never-to-be project was lost to history.
Luckily, that wasn’t the case, as where Chmielarz failed, two other members of the original Metropolis Software team — Kacper Reutt and Jarek Sobierski — managed to salvage at least some of the project, and it is they who recently joined host Arek Kaminski to showcase roughly 10 minutes of prototype footage of the game, which you guessed it, looks quite dated.
Below, you can check out the footage for yourself, courtesy of arhn.eu via Eurogamer.