Hard West - Interview @ Gameplanet

Hard West studio CreativeForge on the Polish game scene, Europe's westerns

Q: It’s somewhat unexpected seeing a western come from a Polish studio. Is there a tradition of westerns in Poland?

Blazej Krakowiak: There is a tradition of westerns going a while back. I don’t want to bore you too much with the history lesson, but it’s not such a well-known fact. We used to be a communist country/part of the communist bloc, and were almost under a Soviet occupation. There was censorship by The Party, but for some reason, westerns were let through because they were seen as more of a universal tale – man against the frontier. Or sometimes they would be presented as something of a caricature of America, the white man against the indigenous population. Somehow, those were the movies that kept coming through, even when nothing else would.
Hard West studio CreativeForge on the Polish game scene, Europe's westerns

Of course, as the rules were easing off a little bit, people would see Star Wars or Robocop in the cinema, but definitely you could see westerns on TV, and while I can’t claim to have this sort of memory personally, my parents and grandparents do: those were the up-to-date looks into the world’s pop culture, something that was coming from beyond the iron curtain. So, they treasured those movies very much. Westerns are enjoyable as a whole: they are very universal, and easy to understand without modern cultural context or anything else.

Plus there was this subset of ‘easterns’ or eastern European westerns, mostly from the Balkan countries, co-produced with Germany. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Winnetou, the book and the movie by the Karl May. It’s a funny story in its own right, because it’s one of the more popular western or wild west stories in Poland and Germany and it was written by a German writer who has never been to America. So people kept seeing those things, kept reading stories like that.

Plus there was this subset of ‘easterns’ or eastern European westerns, mostly from the Balkan countries, co-produced with Germany. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Winnetou, the book and the movie by the Karl May. It’s a funny story in its own right, because it’s one of the more popular western or wild west stories in Poland and Germany and it was written by a German writer who has never been to America. So people kept seeing those things, kept reading stories like that.

If you look at games, other than Red Dead Redemption, all the good modern western games came out of Poland, like the Call of Juarez series including Bound in Blood and The Gunslinger. Incidentally, me and a couple of guys here worked on them, so it’s not like we brought the idea with us [to CreativeForge], but we were definitely familiar, and as people move around in the Polish game dev industry (which is quite extensive by this point), many people have come in contact with westerns as a genre – not just to play but also to work on. Apparently Poland is one of those places that westerns come from.

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