While many developers enter the gaming industry by going to school to learn how to code, others take a more circuitous route. CD Projekt Red has an eye for talent, and game director Pawel Sasko has recounted the tale of how an Estonian beetroot farmer in Australia became a senior developer on codename Polaris, the currently in-development sequel to The Witcher.
In an interview with Flow Games (thanks, GamesRadar+), Sasko revealed that around half of CDPR staff currently working on quests for the next Cyberpunk are former modders. This spurred on the globe-trotting tale of how Eero Varendi came to work at the studio, initially catching Sasko's attention from a world away.
Spending his days toiling to feed Australia's insatiable hunger for beetroots, Varendi would spend his evenings modding, working to recreate the first game's prologue in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. His efforts were brought to the attention of Sasko: "I saw the video, and I was like, 'damn, this is such high-quality work'... he was, I think, 20 or 21, and he was at this time in Australia, and he was collecting beetroot with a huge combine, like those huge harvesters that are driving and collecting. Yeah, amazing guy. He's a senior right now on Polaris, the new Witcher game. He's obsessed about Witcher."