The Witcher TV show's colorful world is inspired by the video games

The showrunner for Netflix's incredible Witcher TV show has explained during a podcast how she designed The Witcher world and where she drew her inspiration from.

The showrunner, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, appeared on the 85th episode of the 'Writer Experience' podcast and sat down for a lengthy chat about how she wrote the hit series. Throughout the chat, Hissrich was asked that even though the Netflix show is based on the book series, did she take anything out of the CD Projekt Red video games. To the surprise of the audience, she replied with yes.

Here's what she said when asked the question, "You know, when I first - I'm not a gamer myself, but when I first took on the project, I found a friend of mine, Matt Owens, who is a huge gamer and I basically insisted that he let me play. And then very quickly, I realized I stopped. So I watched him play and drank some beers. And I took in the visuals of the world. And what I will say is that, that's probably the biggest thing I took from the game".

Hissrich further explains that The Witcher world has a lot of color and is teeming with life. She says that this is something that the developers of the game captured really well and is also something she took from the series to include in her show.

Here's the full statement: "You know, when I first - I'm not a gamer myself, but when I first took on the project, I found a friend of mine, Matt Owens, who is a huge gamer and I basically insisted that he let me play. And then very quickly, I realized I stopped. So I watched him play and drank some beers. And I took in the visuals of the world. And what I will say is that, that's probably the biggest thing I took from the game. Oftentimes people think of fantasy as really dirty and gritty and horrible and everything's dark.

And the truth is, The Witcher actually has a lot of color, has a lot of life, has a lot of everything to it. So that's something I saw on the game, I saw just how beautiful the world could be. And to me, what a great balance for fantasy because this is real life, right? Even in tragedy and real life, the sun still rises, and it sets and that can still be beautiful, even if there's a war going on next door.

So that's something that we took. And also, I think there's a lot of sort of, there's a lot of little easter eggs in the show, that are basically just there to say to video gamers, we see you, we know you're here too. And we know that you love The Witcher and you know, not just because of the book. So we just want to throw out a little things to you as well."

Season 2 of The Witcher will be returning next year, and there's also a animated movie title coming as well. Check out that story here.