Andrzej Sapkowski sold the rights to his Witcher novels for $9,350. He turned down royalties and took a one-time payment instead. The company that bought those rights spent $81 million building the game and won over 800 awards. Sapkowski later demanded $16 million back. They settled.
The photograph at the top of Mount Gorgon shows everyone who made it. All 1,500 of them.
CD Projekt Red started in Warsaw in 1994 selling games from a storefront. For The Witcher 3, they built a team of 240 developers from 18 countries, with 500 voice actors recording across 15 languages. The full script came to 820,000 words, 300,000 more than the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. The playable world covered 136 square kilometers, 3.5 times the size of Skyrim.
The game came out in May 2015. It has since sold over 60 million copies, and Netflix adapted Sapkowski's novels into a series that ran for three seasons.
In 2016, the team was finishing Blood and Wine, a paid expansion for the base game. Quest designer Danisz Markiewicz used a developer camera to move his view outside the playable area and spotted a flat plateau on Mount Gorgon, the highest peak in the expansion. He placed a canvas there. His thinking: players would try to climb that mountain, and they deserved something for it. The photo on the canvas was from the team's summer picnic, shot right after the main game shipped.
You need a mod (a player-made tool) to reach it. The mountain has no path.
Most gaming easter eggs hide a logo, a weapon, or a nod to another title. This one hides the faces of the people who worked across 18 countries, recorded lines in seven languages, and built 136 square kilometers of world. The photo lives on a mountain you were never supposed to reach.