The Witcher: from zero to success

The Polish Tolkien didn’t expect this success at all.

Magic, alchemy, monsters and a charismatic main character. The Witcher is the most critically acclaimed video game. The series so far counts three main games, a couple of mobile games and some flash-based browser games.

The main story that inspired it, comes from the pen of Andrzej Sapkowski, or “the Polish Tolkien” as someone may call him.

It all began in 1985, Sapkowski was a travelling salesman dealing in furs. He was 38 years old, had a degree in economics and spoke many languages. Andrzej was a big fan of fantasy novels and he devoured a lot of books while he travelled. So, as you may understand, writing books was not his first shot in life. But that same year, he entered a short story competition issued by the Polish magazine Fantastyka. According to Andrzej, he did it without an apparent reason. He just knew that he wanted to shake the Polish public with a different kind of story. The only problem was that he had only 30 pages to do so.

Sapkowski decided then, to reinvent a Polish fairytale and make it real. He thought about the Polish story of the poor cobbler who kills a dragon. The cobbler achieves what warriors could not by tricking the dragon into eating a lamb stuffed with sulphur. The dragon drinks so much water from the nearby river in an…