On October 26, 2026, the 19th anniversary of The Witcher, CD Projekt posted a thank-you note. Not to its players, or not only, but to another studio. "19 years ago, an ambitious dream to bring an iconic book series into the world of video games came to life with the release of The Witcher," the company wrote, as reported by PC Gamer. "It was the start of an unforgettable path, which wouldn't have been possible without our friends at BioWare."
The timing gave it weight. PC Gamer notes the post came days after Electronic Arts shut BioWare down. But the more interesting part is why a Polish studio owed BioWare anything in the first place. The answer goes back to a market stall in Warsaw, a lot of imported CDs, and a company that spent its first decade selling other people's games.
The bazaar years
CD Projekt's own history starts with two high school friends, Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński, trading games at the Warsaw computer bazaar on Grzybowska street in the early 1990s. Poland's economy was being rebuilt, trade had spilled into street markets, and the pair started importing new releases. Kiciński handled sales; Iwiński dealt with suppliers and international shipping.
"We would order a batch of discs, then retail them on the bazaar," Iwiński says in the company's account.
In 1994 that became a real business: a company originally called CD Projekt, importing CD-ROM software from the United States. Its first official distribution deal was with American Laser Games, and contracts with Acclaim, Blizzard, Blue Byte, Interplay and Psygnosis followed. In 1996, CD Projekt says, it became the first Polish distributor to sell games in Polish boxes with Polish manuals.
Learning to speak Polish
Localisation was the company's edge, and it's where the record gets a little fuzzy. CD Projekt's history names Baldur's Gate, in 1999, as its first full-fledged Polish localisation. Iwiński, in a 2017 interview with documentary maker Noclip covered by Game Developer, points to an earlier one: "One of the first titles we localized, fully localized, was Ace Ventura." Sales jumped, he said: "instead of hundreds, we started selling small thousands." Whichever came first, the pattern is the same: proper Polish versions sold.
Baldur's Gate is where it paid off big. CD Projekt hired well-known Polish actors, among them Piotr Fronczewski and Wiktor Zborowski, to voice it. The company says the game sold over 100,000 copies, a record at the time, and 18,000 on the first day alone. "People lined up to buy the game and wholesalers got in fights over the product," Iwiński recalls in the company history. That success brought distribution deals for Diablo II and Baldur's Gate II, both games CD Projekt was now selling in Polish. Baldur's Gate was a BioWare game, and PC Gamer notes that CD Projekt joint CEO Michał Nowakowski called BioWare "a massive part of CDPR history" after its closure.
From selling games to making one
The jump to development came out of a project that didn't happen. According to Game Developer's summary of the Noclip interview, a planned Polish version of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance fell through, and CD Projekt formed CD Projekt Red to make a game inspired by it. The studio was founded in 2002.
"We had always wanted to make our own game," Iwiński says in the company's history, describing meetings at trade fairs with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk, BioWare's founders. "Instinctively we felt we belonged in that world."
The game became The Witcher. CD Projekt says work started in September 2003, after the rights to Andrzej Sapkowski's books, which the founders had read in school and university, turned out to be available. "We felt like we had won the lottery," Iwiński says. The budget was nearly 20 million złoty, which CD Projekt says made it the most expensive Polish game ever made at that point. Development took four years and almost 100 people.
It also leaned on BioWare. The Witcher was built on BioWare's Aurora engine, made for Neverwinter Nights, and in its anniversary post CD Projekt credited BioWare with "lending us their Aurora Engine and sharing their knowledge, to giving us a spot at their booth at E3."
Release, and what it set up
The Witcher came out on October 26, 2007. CD Projekt says 35,000 people in Poland bought it within three days, and the game went on to collect over 100 international awards. PC Gamer describes it as a critical hit and, eventually, a sales success, while GOG's history of the trilogy puts its sales at over a million copies.
The bigger outcome was what the studio learned. CD Projekt says work on a sequel began in late 2007, and that it built its own engine, REDengine, for it. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings launched on PC on May 17, 2011. By October 2012 it had sold over 2 million copies, which the company says was nearly double The Witcher's sales over the same stretch after release.
Then came the big one. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched on May 19, 2015, on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, in 15 language versions. CD Projekt says it sold more than 6 million units in its first six weeks and picked up over 300 awards by the end of that year. GOG's retrospective puts its lifetime sales at over 50 million copies across all platforms.
The thank-you note, again
That's the arc in CD Projekt's own telling: from bazaar trader to distributor, from localiser to the studio behind one of the best-known RPG series around. The 2026 anniversary post just puts a name on one of the people who held the door open along the way.
It's a nice reminder for anyone who thinks big studios appear fully formed. This one learned its trade selling and translating other people's games first, and, by its own account, a little help from BioWare got Geralt onto an E3 show floor. Nineteen years on, days after BioWare closed, CD Projekt used its anniversary to say so.
Reporting notes
