CD Projekt Red’s was not the first attempt to make a videogame of The Witcher novels. In 1997, another Polish team at Metropolis Software was working on their own adaptation.
Which other exciting games might still be canceled? Peruse our list of upcoming PC games.
The game got as far as a working prototype, with a scowling Geralt in a purple bodysuit. According to Eurogamerthe prototype had been thought lost, but two Metropolis devs -Kacper Reutt and Jarek Sobierski – have managed to preserve it.
They gave an interview with Arek Kaminski of Polish gaming site Arhn.eu, and play around ten minutes of footage from the prototype alongside it. The interview is in Polish, but you can switch on English subtitles via the button in the bottom-right of YouTube’s player.
Metropolis’s Witcher was to be an action-adventure with some RPG mechanics and a linear story, with occasional branching storylines thrown in. It was also to be an adult game – dealing with darker stories and hard moral choices – in an era when that was much less common.
It got as far as a playable first chapter and a publishing deal, before it became apparent that Metropolis’s ambition had overreached their capacity. The project languished until CD Projekt came calling about the licence in 2002, and you know what happened to Geralt next. As for Metropolis, CD Projekt bought them in 2008, and closed them the next year.