Life has a funny way of surprising you. One minute you could be a farmer working the land for beetroot and the next, helping one of the best gaming studios in the world develop their next highly anticipated title. Of course, being really good at harvesting beets isn’t going to get you through the door ofCD Projekt Red, but having excellent modding skills thrown in there certainly doesn’t hurt at all as seen by one Estonian farmer living in Australia.
We all know how incredibleCyberpunk 2077andThe Witcher 3are for players who love to mod and take advantage of the game’s features and add-ons, but many only get to dream about actually working on CDPR’s next title, The Witcher 4. That dream came to life for part-time modder and beetroot harvester, Eero Varendi.
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From Beetroot Farming To The Covinenet
In an interview withFlow Games, CD Projekt Red’s Associate Game Director Pawel Sasko started off chatting about how around half of the Cyberpunk 2 team making quests in the game are all former modders, telling inspiring developers to put themselves out there and “learn how to mod.” Opening about how the studio’s unique modding enterprise, Sasko said, “There’s a small team called Yigsoft that’s composed only of modders. It’s around 20 of them, and they’re working with us. I don’t want to call them an outsource because they’re really not, they’re a part of us.”
To showcase this example of putting yourself out there in the name of your dream, Sasko tells the story of how an Estonian beetroot farmer,Eero Varendi, who was living in Australia at the time, ended up joining the CD Projekt team after Sasko noticed his amazing modding skills on YouTube. “I saw the video and I was like, ‘damn this is such high-quality work’ so I asked Philipp Weber, who is a modder, ‘Do you know this guy in the community?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I know who he is,”
Sasko goes on to say that he asked Weber to contact Varendi to ask for his CV (resume) and, from there, got him to do a test which he passed with flying colors. Knowing that this was the start of something amazing for the farmer and the CDPR team, Sasko flew him out to Poland to begin an incredible career at the studio working on the next Witcher game.
“We had conversations, and 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. That’s what he was doing, and he was modding in the evenings,” said Sasko. “So I got him from Australia to Poland, and he’s from Estonia and his name’s Eero Varendi. Yeah, amazing guy. He’s a senior right now on Polaris, the new Witcher game. He’s obsessed about Witcher.”
It just goes to show you that no matter where you are in life, you’re able to still achieve your dreams as long as you never give up on them! As for now, The Witcher 4 seems to be years away from its release, but if there is any comfort to take out of that, it’scurrently CDPR’s “most advanced” gamecurrently in development.
