Studio co-founded by Olga Tokarczuk to make game based on her work wins €4m grant

A Polish games studio co-founded by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, and which is working on a video game based on one of her books, has won a grant of almost 17 million zloty (€3.9 million) to help it develop technology for “creating psychologically coherent characters”.

“This incredible support will allow us to bring our vision to life,” celebrated Sundog, an independent studio founded in 2022 by gaming industry veterans and Tokarczuk, the Nobel literature laureate for 2018. She acts as the firm’s head of creative oversight and sits on its board.

The studio is working with Tokarczuk on a game, titled Ibru, that is inspired by her 2006 novel Anna In in the Tombs of the World. It will be “an immersive role-playing game set in a science-fantasy world blending ancient Sumerian mythology and cyberpunk”, says Sundog.

The studio has now been granted 16.9 million zloty by the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development (PARP), a state body, to develop some of the technology that will be used in Ibru.

That was the largest amount of money received by any of the five games companies that received grants under PARP’s latest funding round to support small and medium-sized enterprises, notes Puls Biznesu, a business daily.

The newspaper reports that Sundog will use the grant to develop a system for “creating non-linear RPGs [role-playing games] in Unreal Engine 5…[with] psychologically consistent characters whose decisions will reflect their implied psychology, based on research in the fields of game studies, psychology and AI”.

The project’s costs are estimated at 21 million zloty (€4.86 million). Individual investors are expected to provide the remaining 4 million zloty needed to finance it.

Sorry to interrupt your reading. The article continues below.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

When launching her collaboration with Sundog, Tokarczuk suggested that Anna In in the Tombs of the World (titled Anna In w grobowcach świata in Polish) would be the best fit for the project.

The novel retells the myth of Ishtar (Inanna in Sumerian) – an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of love, war and fertility, who descends to the land of the dead – with a futuristic twist.

In the game, the player will act as a detective investigating the disappearance of Inanna “using a plethora of unique skills, including those unavailable to mere mortals”.

“In your journey to uncover the truth, you will uncover secrets, plots and conspiracies that will challenge the very notion of reality,” say the game’s creators.

Tokarczuk says she will assist in development wherever possible, “mainly with narrative issues”. The author, who also won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, says that she hopes “a clever and fascinating intellectual adventure will emerge” from her collaboration with Sundog.

The studio, which currently employs ten people but plans to increase its workforce to 30, aims to release Ibru in 2027.

Poland’s computer games industry has been a huge success story. Its most famous firm, CD Projekt, has developed global hits such as the series The Witcher (based on the world of another renowned Polish author, Andrzej Sapkowski) and Cyberpunk 2077.

Disclaimer: Olga Tokarczuk is a member of the advisory board of the Notes from Poland Foundation. However, she has no involvement in the work of the Notes from Poland news website and had no influence on the reporting of this story

Main image credit: Harald Krichel/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.