CD Projekt

Lore & Background

CD Projekt was founded in May 1994 by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński, who had previously sold video games at a Warsaw marketplace. The company began by localizing foreign games into Polish, collaborating with Interplay Entertainment for two Baldur's Gate games. After Interplay's financial difficulties led to the cancellation of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, CD Projekt reused the code to develop its own game, which became The Witcher (2007). The company later released The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011) and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020). In 2009, CDP Investment announced plans to merge with Optimus S.A.; the merger closed in December 2010, and Optimus became CD Projekt S.A. in July 2011. By September 2017, it was the largest publicly traded video game company in Poland, and by May 2020, the largest in Europe. In March 2018, it joined the WIG20 index. On 23 June 2026, the company name was changed to CD Projekt RED S.A.

In Their Own Story

The Warsaw office hummed at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday in early 2005. A stack of retail boxes sat on the shipping desk, each one stamped with the Painkiller logo—a snarling face wreathed in chains. Across the room, a CD Projekt marketing lead flipped through a localisation sheet for the German release, muttering under his breath about how many times the word 'demon' appeared in the first twenty minutes of dialogue. On the monitor, a build from People Can Fly's Kraków team was still loading: a character mid-air, rocket-propelled, chain-saw already spinning, screaming into a void of red rock and screaming geometry. The publisher's job was done. The game was theirs to ship. What happened when a player grabbed that chain-saw in a living room in Berlin or a bedroom in Osaka—that was no longer anyone's job. It was just the game, running, howling, and breaking the floor.

Reader's Guide

The source article does not mention Painkiller or any relationship with People Can Fly. Therefore, any claim that CD Projekt published Painkiller titles is unsupported by the source.

Did You Know?

• CD Projekt was founded with only $2,000 and used a friend's flat as a rent-free office.
• The company's first successful localization was for Ace Ventura, selling thousands of copies.
• The Witcher series was influenced by the Gothic game series, which CD Projekt localized and published in Poland.
• GOG.com was launched in 2008 to offer old games free of digital rights management (DRM).