CD Projekt Red‘s Pawel Sasko, who’s now the associate game director on Cyberpunk 2, has explained how a beetroot farmer in Australia came to his attention and was subsequently moved to Poland to work on The Witcher 4.
In an extensive interview with Flow Games, Sasko advised aspiring game developers to “go and learn how to mod” because about half of the people making quests for Cyberpunk 2 right now are former modders. In the same interview, he told an inspiring story about senior quest designer Eero Varendi, who started out making mods in his evenings after toiling lands for beetroot. Varendi first caught Sasko’s attention “seven or eight years ago” when a YouTube video was published showing The Witcher 1’s prologue in The Witcher 3 thanks to the miracle of mods.
“I saw the video and I was like, ‘damn this is such high quality work, so I asked [CDPR narrative director Philipp Weber], who is a modder, ‘do you know this guy in the community?’ and he said, ‘yeah, I know who he is,” [and I said] message him and tell him to send us his CV.’ He sent me the CV and we did the test, the test was wonderful. He was great. He did great design test.
“And then we had conversations, and he was I think 20 or 21, and he was at this time in Australia, and he was collecting beetroot with a huge combine, like those huge harvesters that are driving and collecting. That’s what he was doing, and he was modding in the evenings. So I got him from Australia to Poland, and he’s from Estonia and his name’s Eero Varendi. Yeah, amazing guy. He’s a senior right now on Polaris, the new Witcher game. He’s obsessed about Witcher.”
It’s not uncommon for video game studios to hire accomplished modders as staff, with Valve, Activision Blizzard, Bethesda, and even Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone being examples other than CDPR. That said, the makeup of Cyberpunk 2’s quest team being half former modders is extraordinary no matter the context, and this insight from Sasko shows it can happen to anyone, no matter where they live, so long as their work can speak for itself.