When recruiting for large-scale projects, CD Projekt Red does not hesitate to turn to the modding community. This is how an Estonian farmer joined the Polish studio to work on The Witcher 4.
The Witcher 4 is CD Projekt Red’s most advanced project. It involves several dozen people, with varied profiles. We find veteran developers, programmers with fresh ideas and… more atypical personalities. This is the case of Eero Varendi, an Estonian that CD Projekt Red poached while he was growing beets in Australia. An improbable destiny.
This anecdote was told by Pawel Sasko, associate director of CD Projekt Red, during an interview he gave to the Flow Games channel on July 8, 2024 (via PC Gamer). If Eero Varendi was not a priori destined for a career in video games, he is not a novice either. Passionate about the saga The Witcher, he made his mark in modding, these projects which allow to freely modify a game to improve it.
If you’re a modder, CD Projekt Red may have a position for you.
Pawel Sasko came across a video of Eero Varendi, who was having fun modifying The Witcher 3: Wild Hunta complete autodidact, when he wasn’t picking beets. He reveals: ” There was a video on YouTube of a fan who, without any modding tools, started to make a remake of The Witcher prologue in The Witcher 3. »
Impressed by the work done by Eero Varendi, he asked a colleague, an ex-modder, if he knew him. The rest is like a fairy tale: “ He sent me a CV and we did a test, which turned out to be incredible (…). We had a conversation, he must have been 20 or 21 at the time, he was in Australia and he was picking beets with a huge harvester. He was doing that during the day, and he was modding at night. I flew him from Australia to Poland, he’s originally from Estonia and his name is Eero Varendi. He’s an incredible guy. He’s a senior now and he’s working on Polaris, the next Witcher game, he’s obsessed with The Witcher. »
Eero Varendi is not a unique case within CD Projekt Red, as Pawel Sasko confides. Among the 24 people working on the quests of the sequel to Cyberpunk 2077half of which comes from the modding community — and not just modders specializing in the Polish studio’s games. The person concerned concludes and advises: ” For young people wondering how to get into the industry, I would say go into modding (…). There are so many tools to do it and, really, some of our best talent is former modders. »
Source: www.numerama.com
