Poland is one of the largest markets for video games in the world and the home of one of the world’s biggest video game industries.
This means that the success of the worldwide video game industry relies on high-quality Polish translation, with the language being the 10th most popular on video game platform Steam and the country’s game industry being the fourth-largest exporter of electronic entertainment.
It is an industry built on translation and nowhere is this more clear than in the origin of one of Poland’s largest companies, CD Projekt.
Whilst better known for game development, especially its flagship Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher series, the company started in May of 1994, right as Poland itself was shifting towards a market-based economy.
Unlike fellow pioneer Metropolis Software, which primarily focused on making original games written in Polish, CD Projekt made its mark by importing popular games and localising them into Polish, providing a better experience than what could be found through piracy and much rougher translations.
Their first attempt was a full localisation of the 7th Level point-and-click adventure Ace Ventura, based on the film and animated series of the same name.
Much like other graphic adventures such as Teenagent, Ace Ventura is a game that relies heavily on its zany and irreverent sense of humour and witty dialogue, which were elements that could easily be lost in translation.
The game served as a test to see if Polish audiences would buy a game that was well-designed and localised with a high level of effort. It turned out to be a success, as several thousand people bought copies, providing a degree of vindication.
The ultimate test for them was the 1998 RPG Baldur’s Gate, which had a full voice cast and a lot of dialogue to translate, to the point that only a dedicated localisation team could do it justice.
CD Projekt hired Polish actors to voice the characters and added bonus items to the box, and the result was a game that sold 18,000 units on its first day at a time when most games would struggle to sell more than 2000 copies in total.
It led to further translation opportunities but after the troublesome development of the sequel Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance and the folding of the company Interplay, CD Projekt opted to move into game development using the code they had written for this port.
The result was an adaptation of The Witcher, a series that has since become a worldwide phenomenon.