RPS: Finally, the moment everyone’s been waiting for: let’s talk about Game of Thrones. You’re a big fan, and there are some obvious parallels between the way Witcher and Game of Thrones operate. Aside from the obvious ones – dark fantasy settings, a love of killing kings, etc – there’s the dreaded art of sexposition.Iwinski: But it makes sense. Both in the show and in our game.
RPS: Some pundits say Game of Thrones uses it as a crutch, though. People talk a bunch, so they use it to keep eyes on the screen.
Iwinski: I totally disagree with that, but I have a story [laughs]. We were showing Witcher 1 for the first time… and I think it goes back to a different cultural perception of sex. In the US, it’s pretty much a no-go zone. It explains, for example, why you have a very thriving porn industry – which is a bit of a contradiction [laughs]. But, you know, business is business, one could say.
Back home [in Poland], though, it’s just a normal part of life. So with the famous – or infamous, you could say – sex cards, European journalists were like “Oh, cool.” And then we showed Witcher 1 to people in the US, and they were like [gasps in an impressively high pitch]. A lot of the key magazines treated the whole thing as a big feature, and they were writing how our programmer was excited about the sex cards in the game.
So there are different views on these things. But, for me, I read George R. R. Martin’s books after one of the journalists left our presentation of Witcher 1 and told me “Wow, it’s a bit like Game of Thrones!” So I went out and bought the books and read them straight [through]. And in the books, I think there’s even more sex and nudity than there is in the TV series. Is it problematic in the books? For me, it’s not. It just makes sense. It’s power, politics, and sex. It is how we are – how we humans behave. It’s all about power, money, and sex. Come on, look at [E3]. Look at the booth babes.
