Image: Netflix/The Witcher
When it comes to mega fantasy franchises that have spanned multiple mediums, there really isn’t anything quite like The Witcher. When Andrezej Sapkowski began publishing the tales of professional monster hunter Geralt of Rivia in the Polish science fiction and fantasy magazine Fantastyka in 1986, the titular Witcher quickly took the country’s fantasy scene by storm. The short stories, which have since been gathered together into two volumes, garnered such a strong following that Sapkowski went on to write five full length novels that told the complete tale of Geralt, his on-again-off-again sorceress lover Yennefer of Vengerberg, and their adoptive child Ciri.
The final novel of the original saga, The Lady of the Lake, was published in 1999. It marked the end of an era. The Witcher has been hailed as Poland’s A Song of Ice and Fire, and the moniker is well-earned.
But the end of the books wasn’t the end for Geralt and company. Two years earlier, Polish video game company CD Projekt Red acquired the rights to make video games based on the Witcher’s adventures. It was a risky proposition: video game adaptations from other mediums are rarely successful. But in 2007, CD Projekt finally released its reimagining of Geralt’s story. While the first game had a cult following, by the time The Witcher III: Wild Hunt was released in 2015, Geralt and his companions had overtaken the gaming world in much the same way they had the Polish literary world almost three decades earlier.
One of the most interesting things about the Witcher games is that, rather than directly adapt the plot of the books, they serve as both a reimagining and a sequel set five years later. They do take some plot elements from the book and recreate them as a way to honor the source material, but the majority of the games consist of new stories, with new arcs for the characters. There are new monsters, new morally gray situations, and lots of new character development.
And on top of that, they’re just incredibly well-created games. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the third Witcher game did for the Western role-playing games what A Game of Thrones did for television. It was a massive hit unlike almost anything that had come before it, earning more than 800 Game of the Year awards and spawning several “clones” that tried to follow in its footsteps.
Now, with Netflix already having put out one season of a Witcher TV show, Geralt of Rivia is poised to take over the television world as well. And while the series is more of a direct adaptation of the books, it’s also doing some interesting things — like its multiple timelines and it showing us what happened at the Battle of Sodden — to set itself apart.
Wouldn’t it be cool to see it pull in elements from the games as well? There are some moments and characters from the video games that are every bit as iconic as anything in the books, and we know exactly which ones we want to see onscreen:
