The Witcher creator Andrzej Sapkowski continues to have a conflicted relationship with CD Projekt RED's renown game adaptation. A while ago he said that he doesn't have anything against games and admitted he was stupid to sell all the rights to CDPR, which then made excellent games. However, he keeps saying that CDPR's trilogy spoiled his books' market and that he made the games popular, not the other way around.
Speaking to Waypoint, Metro 2033 author Dmitry Glukhovsky didn't go light on his colleague's beliefs.
I think that he's totally wrong, and that he's an arrogant motherfucker.
Without the gaming franchise, the Witcher series would never get this crazy international readership that it has. And it's not just about the gamers but the gaming press and the buzz it creates, and just the feeling of something great and massive and impressive coming out. This got people hooked. He would remain a local Eastern European phenomenon without this, but he would never break into the West. And the same goes for my Metro books.
It happened so that the game developers were among the first readers. The creative lead of 4A Games, Andrei Proharov, was sent a link to the website by some of his friends, and he read it overnight and thought it was a perfect story for their next game.
I decided to use this opportunity to tell my own kind of story, and I was not at all judging video games as a danger to my precious property. Quite the contrary, I thought that it's a great opportunity to promote the entire IP. And that was exactly the way it worked.
They did a great job. I think Metro 2033 is the world's first lyrical, sentimental and philosophical 3D shooter.
There might be a generational conflict at play here - after all, Sapkowski is 68 while Glukhovsky is 37, which means he was born into the gaming revolution era.
Metro 2033 should get a movie adaptation by Michael De Luca and Stephen L'Heureux. Meanwhile, the new Metro 2035 book launched a few months ago while Deep Silver is quiet on the game side of the franchise (though that might change at E3 2017).
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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