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Before Henry Cavill put on a white wig and brought the Demon Hunter live-action series into homes, and even before CDPR made Geralt the most famous game character in gaming history, a group of Polish fans built the world of Demon Hunter in a little-known fan game, Arkadia.
Arkadia is a MUD game based on Anjay Sapkowski's Demon Hunter series and Games Workshop's Warhammer series (Multiple User Domain, collectively known as a text online game), first launched in 1997. Players log in to the game, create characters, and enter text commands with others on the same server to explore two different areas created based on the continents of Demon Hunter and Warhammer.
▲ Medieval Warhammer World Map
Over the past 25 years, Arkadia has earned a loyal fan base of Polish players, but few Demon Hunter fans abroad are aware of the game's existence because it is a text game that speaks entirely Polish.
Still, Arkadia had a profound impact on subsequent Adaptations of Demon Hunter, with some members of the team even joining CDPR's development efforts for the first Demon Hunter game and creating an official world map. Recently, I spoke to arkadia creators about the game's origins, the player community that supported its survival, and its lasting impact on subsequent Demon Hunter games.
▲ New web client design in 2014
Born into poverty
In 1996, Polish programmer Arkadiusz Lewy convened a team of 10 volunteers to create a Polish MUD using the drivers behind Lars Pensj's GenesisLPMud in 1989. There were a few other Polish MUD games on the market at the time, but most of them were in the classical fantasy genre and were mixed in English and Polish.
Lewy and his team of volunteers (nicknamed wizards for most of the LPMuds tradition) wanted to create a shallow fantasy world based entirely in Polish, where magic exists but is not part of everyday life. They named the new MUD Arkadia after the founders. However, the development work did not get off to a smooth start, and the most critical problem came from their organization, or lack of organization.
"Lewy has an amazing talent, which is to be passionate and able to bring many talented people around him, but he is not a good organizer." Jakub Szewczyk, whose ID is "Alvin," recalls that he was one of the game's original developers. "He didn't know how to operate at all. We initially decided to do a hard fantasy MUD, but Lewy said, "You can do whatever you want." It was an optimistic approach, but after a year, it proved to be ineffective."
The team deviated from their original goals and began developing areas based on their favorite novels, such as Gondor and Charles in The Lord of the Rings and Ursula Le Guin's Sea of The Earth. They locate these locations based on the worlds in The Witcher, Warhammer, Sons of Colombo, and Margit Sandemo's The Legend of the Iceman. But they quickly realized that the team was too fragmented and that they would struggle to get everything done without proper cuts.
According to Szewczyk, the team cut 80 percent of its work, removing everything except Demon Hunter and Warhammer. This further helped the team find a center of gravity, but they still had some challenges to overcome. For example, server space rental services were not common when high-speed Internet was not as popular as they are today. So they came up with a plan to hide servers in universities across Poland.
Arkadia server in Białystok in 1999
"This is completely unauthorized." Szewczyk says, "The server is either in the basement or pretending to be just a normal computer. The first two servers were arranged by Lewy, once again thanks to his outstanding ability to find resources. Later, the server hid throughout Poland. Whether something went wrong or we were caught on the spot, the way to deal with it was to pack it up and move it somewhere else."
Arkadia first went live on December 23, 1997, with two areas for players to access – spawn points and a second area with a billboard. This is to familiarize players with the mechanics of LPMud. Two days later, other parts of the world were also opened to players, introducing important locations such as the city of Novigli in Ridania (Demon Hunter), Devon in Kodwin (Demon Hunter), and nun (Warhammer), the large city of the Human Empire.
▲ Distribution of cities and routes in some areas
Arkadia is online
On December 25, 1997, when players log in to Arkadia, they begin their adventure from the anchorage village in Temoriah. This is the location of the book Age of Contempt, where Geralt kills a group of mercenaries while searching for Yennefa and Ciri.
Players can choose from one of six selectable races (Dwarves, Gnomes, Humans, Elves, Busts, and Ogres) and can then enter the outside world to complete missions and role-play with other players. Interestingly, players can't be demon hunters, because the production team knows that if they are allowed to do so, everyone will want to be demon hunters. Like other LPMud games, this game has a lot in common with MMORPG, such as combat, skill levels, and loot mechanics.
Players will encounter monsters randomly in the world, or they can attack other players. The outcome of the battle depends heavily on your character's attributes, equipment, and terrain, which can affect you favorably or unfavorably. If you win, you can loot items or get souvenirs from the losers. But if you lose, you'll have to complete a death story to get back to the living.
Players' initial feedback was mostly positive. Some have criticized the game for being different from other Polish-language MUDs, but most fans are curious about the new game based on Sapkowski's novel. Behind the scenes, the game team expanded to about 30 people, and new volunteers joined the team, including Piotr Kacprzak with the ID "Zabbas" and Karol Kowalczyk with the ID "Leim".
▲ Arkadia: The Nation on the Web
"I didn't join the team at the beginning." Kowalczyk recalls, "I remember my first contact with Arkadia was because I was playing WITH MUD, and then someone said to me, 'Hey, we've got a new LPMUD set in the world of Demon Hunter.'" I was reading all the books in the Demon Hunter series. At that time, the series only produced three books. I remember that it was completely effortless to become the developer of Arkadia, and I applied directly, and the idea was that although I was not very interested in playing a Demon Hunter game, I was very interested in making one. So, since I was a big fan of Sapkowski at the time and didn't play Warhammer, I joined the team."
"We have about 20-40 developers behind the scenes." Kacprzak adds, "Some people are like me who just write code or logic for the game itself, while others are more linguistically gifted and write text descriptions and things like that. In addition, we have other people who specialize in coordinating developers. So, in every realm, there's going to be a wizard who's going to say, 'Okay, let's do Nowegry, or next time we'll do this.'" 」
The following year, news of Arkadia spread widely, both because word of mouth spread and because secret service magazine published an article titled "Arkadia: The Nation on the Web," which brought more players to the game. In response to the growing demand, the team set a limit of up to 120 people online at the same time on the server to ensure that the game ran smoothly.
▲ The first web client design of Arkadia in 2008
The whole world is the stage
Over the next few years, the development of Arkadia was in full swing. The team created some new roads and added new areas, such as the Skellyg Islands, which appeared in the fourth Demon Hunter novel, The Tower of Swifts, published in 1997. They also introduced racial associations such as the Mahacan Dwarves and Terran Foresters; as well as regular organizations such as the Merchants' Association of Novigari, the Berserkers' Association of Skelliger, and the Squirrel Party Guerrillas.
Players can apply to join these new organizations to gain various advantages such as emoticons, discounted merchandise, and better weapons, but to be accepted by the group, you'll need to prove yourself first.
"The association can give you a lot of power, and then you will be much stronger than others." Kowalczyk said, "But the association is not for everyone. You have to be recognized by other players, which can be said to be a deliberate imbalance. So only those players with excellent role-playing skills have a chance to be accepted by others and gain greater power. This is true of associations such as the Knights of Sigma's Blood, the Squirrel Party, and the Pirates of Skelig."
▲ One of the earliest versions of Novi Grey, the market in the lower right corner was added later
The developers want Arkadia to be a platform where players can perform their own fantasy adventures. In many ways, they were successful. Players create their own unofficial associations, wage bloody wars, and occupy desolate areas on the map to cosplay with others. While players can just go through the experience over and over again to see what missions are available, these are only part of the game and are usually not the most appealing parts.
"When you play alone, you definitely feel like every step is in order, without any freedom." 」 Szewzyk commented, "But the addition of other players has brought a whole new complexity to the game. Especially if you compare it to other large RPGs with graphical interfaces. Only when it is based on text can a game have such depth. Because it's all about imagination, not just your character going somewhere, killing a dragon and getting a new weapon."
▲ Screenshot of the website of the old version of Arkaida
It is because of the existence of this community of players who are good at weaving stories that Arkaida is different from the subsequent Adaptations of Demon Hunter, and it has a rich history of happening among players. Although there are set missions and battles in the game against the enemy, arkadia wizards usually do not interfere with the behavior of the players (or should be called mortals), unless there are wizards who want to collect the price from some scammer, they will make a temporary exception. Instead, they're more about providing guidance and leading things in the right direction.
For example, when a player gathers a group of friends to form an unofficial association of sex workers, wizards don't want to ban the behavior outright. So they specify some rough guidelines to make sure players act in moderation and avoid any potential problems that may arise. Similarly, the Society is free to declare war on anyone, but if there is a conflict that cannot be justified in the context of the game, a GM or wizard may try to dissuade them in order to maintain the realism of the world.
▲ In the early days, the Mahakan Mountains were the stronghold of bandits
Some of the most interesting stories that have ever happened in Arkadia have arisen from these conflicts. For example, the game's history mentions battles between the Squirrel Party and the half-elves of Maripeau, as well as the Berserker invasion of Kodwin in the early 2000s. During a conflict, the association can choose to ally with one party or remain neutral.
But as stated in The Demon Hunter, neutrality often comes at a cost. Take the novigari merchants, for example, who are typically a neutral group of merchants, usually doing business with everyone, seeking to maximize profits, and sometimes involving transactions such as supplying weapons to the squirrel party. If their actions are discovered, they will undermine their neutral nature and provoke reprisals from other associations.
"The wars recorded in the history of the game may be a very memorable period, and many people participated in it for various reasons." Pawe Ro ciszewsk, a player with the ID "Yarrid," said he later joined the arkadia development team, "but war is always part of the game, and some associations are always at war with each other, such as squirrel parties and human groups." These guys never stop fighting. It's the same in Warhammer, where you can join the Faction of Light or become a mutant of the Chaos faction."
▲ World map of Arkadia
A long-standing heritage
Arkadia has been around for 25 years, and has witnessed countless changes during that time. Developers came and went, and new volunteers took the torch. But what's amazing about Arkadia isn't just its longevity, it's also about how the game continues to influence adaptations of other Sapkowski's works. The most famous example is the Arkadia world map, which later appeared in CDPR's The Witcher series.
In the early '00s, six volunteers gathered in a small clinic in Warsaw to hammer out the details of the Arkadia world map. Sapkowski had never before mapped the continent of The Demon Hunter, and the most widely used interpretation was a sketch by translator Stanislav Komárek for the Czech version of the Demon Hunter.
The group of volunteers, including Galen, Hubert mietanka with the ID "Hub", Greensun, Kowalczyk, Kacprzak, and another, wanted to see if they could improve the sketch while making the world of Arkadia more faithful to the original. Eventually, they made a hand-drawn sketch for Kowalczyk to take home for computer drawing.
▲ Stanislav Komárek's original map sketch
"From my memory, we met at Galen's student house in a small clinic on Banacha Street in Warsaw." Mietanka recalls, "He was a student at the Medical University of Warsaw. After drinking something like honey wine for a few hours, we drew a sketch. I remember being Greensun, Galen, me, Leim, Zabbas, and another person."
"When we started doing it, the most popular version of the Continent Map of Demon Hunter was the Czech version." Kowalczyk adds, "But it wasn't accurate enough, and when Sapkowski released his follow-ups, he added more and more details to the world, so he didn't think everything through, and we had to compromise on the contradictions of each work." We found a time to meet and drew a map of the continent for two hundred years for the leaders of Arkadia. This map is based in part on the Czech version, but also includes other maps that were released at the time, as well as those parts of our world that already exist, namely the roads we made."
They had no intention of making the map public, but when Kowalczyk left Arkadia in 2004 to join CDPR as the story designer and screenwriter for another Demon Hunter adaptation, he eventually brought the map with him and used it in CDPR's first two Demon Hunter series. Because of this, you can find many references and Easter eggs about Arkadia in the Demon Hunter trilogy, including a tribute to the Quindis Fortress in the Blue Mountains, the stronghold of the Free Elf Association in Arkadia.
Arkadia may not be an official adaptation or as well-known as a recent Netflix series or CDPR game, but it was (and will continue to be) loved by gamers. The game paved the way for future adaptations of Sapkowski's world, and remains a unique experience for Demon Hunter fans today, allowing players to explore this well-known world as a rebel, farmer, or wizard. The premise is that they can read the original text of the Demon Hunter series.
Translation | Night Cat
Edit | Zoe