Different Tales, an indie video game developer, was nominated for a 2019 Polityka Passport award for its debut game. However, its founders Jacek Brzeziński and Artur Ganszyniec can hardly be considered debutants, as they have both had a long career in the industry.
Brzeziński started his at the beginning of the 21st century with the Metropolis studio, where he worked as a programmer on projects such as Archangel and Gorky Zero. However, his breakthrough project was CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher – this is how he met Ganszyniec, who was also one of the main designers of the game and led the team responsible for its plot. Both of them also worked on the second part of The Witcher series, and at that time Ganszyniec also created the popular Polish RPG system Wolsung: Steam Pulp Fantasy in cooperation with Maciej Sabat. After the second instalment of The Witcher series, Brzeziński and Ganszyniec worked at Techland on level design for Call of Juarez: The Cartel. Brzeziński later became the chief designer of the Riptide expansion to Techland’s greatest hit of the time, the game Dead Island, and later also took part in the work on Dying Light. In the meantime, Ganszyniec worked as a designer for AT Games, a company which produces mobile games, where he co-created, among other things, the well-received Another Case Solved and Puzzle Craft. Later, Brzeziński joined the team of the Danish I/O studio to work on another part of the famous Hitman series released in 2017, and Ganszyniec led an (in the end, unreleased) project at 11 Bit Studios.
In 2018, Ganszyniec and Brzeziński founded Different Tales out of a longing for a style of gaming that they call ‘slow gaming’ – focused on calm, meditative games requiring concentration and intended for a mature audience. They gathered a very diverse team, including anthropologists Marta Malinowska and Joanna Wołyńska, journalists Karolina Sulej and Mateusz Kubik and graphic designer Piotr Niklas. Different Tales’ first production was Wanderlust Travel Stories, a text game about travelling to the farthest corners of the world. However, while video games usually focus on spectacular, exotic adventures, Wanderlust is much closer to a reportage. There are no sensational themes here, but the characters of the game look at what often escapes the eyes of sightseeing tourists – the dark sides of globalisation, growing inequalities and the everyday problems of the inhabitants of distant lands. Seeing all this, travellers from affluent countries gradually realise their own co-responsibility for what they are looking at. Each journey changes the characters of the game, often depending on the player’s choices. The decisions are not as spectacular here as in many other games – often they simply concern the direction in which the hero’s mood swings, or whether he drinks coffee or tea for breakfast. However, after several runs, it turns out that such small choices can later have a huge, gradually growing importance. And rightly so – because Wanderlust is to a large extent a game that shows how important details are for every journey. An inattentive tourist simply passes by them while a traveller notices and appreciates them.