Sundog – a company in which Olga Tokarczuk has shares – will receive PLN 16.9 million from the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development. The company creates a unique RPG game. It will receive funds under the SMART Path, which supports micro, small and medium-sized entrepreneurs. The Movie Games game studio is also involved in the project prepared by Sundog. Robert Lewandowski is an investor in this company. The subsidy for Sundog is the largest among video game companies. For 2.7 thousand 201 applications were positively assessed for the amount of over PLN 1.4 billion – “Puls Biznes” reports.
Olga Tokarczuk is creating a game based on her book
“Sundog is an independent game development studio founded by industry veterans. It is the first studio in the history of video games to cooperate with a Nobel Prize-winning author,” we read on the company's website. Currently, the studio is working on the Ibru game. This is a detective RPG created together with Olga Tokarczuk, based on one of her books titled “Anna In w tombowiech świata”. Ibru will be an immersive RPG set in a science-fantasy world drawing from ancient Sumerian mythology and cyberpunk.
The game will be built on Unreal Engine 5. However, the grant awarded by PARP will not be allocated entirely to the creation of Ibru, but to the development of the InteGra system. This is a technology “for creating non-linear RPG games in Unreal Engine 5, enabling the creation of psychologically coherent characters whose decisions will reflect their implied psyche, based on research in the field of science, psychology and technology. AI (LLM)”.
The Polish Nobel Prize winner is the largest shareholder in the game studio. Sundog is considering a stock exchange debut
Olga Tokarczuk is creatively supervising the project. As the largest shareholder, she is also the Chairwoman of the Supervisory Board at Sundog. According to information Tokarczuk has 19 shares (this share is presented in a pie chart, which may suggest that it is 19% of the shares, but adding up all the shares, their number is 101, so it is possible that we are dealing with an error or inaccuracy). Aleksandra Bieluk, Mateusz Błaszczyk, Carlos Castanon and Zbyszko Finigas have 17 shares each. 14 shares remain in the hands of the remaining shareholders.
– Our goal was to make a game based on the best possible existing plot. Hence the contact with Olga Tokarczuk and the selection of her book – he said last year Mateusz Błaszczyk, creative director and co-founder of Sundog.
A game can be a different way of entering the story, experiencing it in a different way. I think this is an opportunity for my book. (…) I am interested in everything that is created and I try to help, mainly in narrative matters. I hope that it will become a wise and fascinating intellectual adventure
– Tokarczuk said in turn.
Last year, the premiere of Ibru was planned for 2026. The production is supposed to be enough for 16 hours of gameplay. Before the game's release, Sundog is still considering its debut on stock exchange NewConnect.