As part of a promotional stunt for the – at the time – upcoming The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you may recall CD Projekt Red ran a countdown on the website. What you might not know, however, is for a moment there, there was nothing to actually count down to.
CDPR’s Borys Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz, the English director for the RPG now celebrating its 10th anniversary, recently told PC Gamer magazine that the studio decided to nix the big reveal that was initially planned at the end of the countdown.
“I don’t remember, actually, the nature of the announcement we were going to make,” Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz recalled, “but we had the countdown on the website and then we decided not to make the announcement.”
Unfortunately, there was no going back from having put the countdown on their site, and the team had to quickly come up with another announcement for fans lest they reach zero with nothing to show for it.
As the studio scrambled for something to live up to the expectations the countdown had set, the idea was floated to just “enlist a top actor and, when the clock runs down, announce them as the big reveal,” according to Pugacz-Muraszkiewicz. Soon after, a member of CD Projekt Red’s business development team’s contacts were raided in order to find a big name talent to tag onto the upcoming title.
This resulted in the quick recruitment of Charles Dance, who at the time was playing Tywin Lannister on the smash-hit show Game of Thrones. With Dance now committed to play the Emperor of Nilfgaard in The Witcher 3, the studio narrowly avoided any possible embarrassment for the countdown to nothing.
