Their first major success was with Baldur's Gate (1998) with which they had 18,000 units sold on its first day of release in Poland.
They would then package the game with localized instruction manuals and other physical goodies, hoping that the added features would draw buyers away from pirated copies. They would obtain import rights from foreign publishers, and where possible, provide in-game localization for text and voice lines, typically through reverse engineering to decompile the game's code. ĬD Projekt was founded by Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński in 1994 for the purposes to trying to bring legitimate sales of foreign game titles into Poland, knowing they would have no easy way to compete against pirated copies. The consumer perception of copyright in Poland remained the same after the change of government, making it difficult for legitimate sales of electronic media pirated and bootlegged versions were sold in open markets next to boxed copies of the legitimate productions for a fraction of the cost. While under Communism, copyright laws in Poland were virtually non-existent and unenforceable, and copyright infringement, in the form of piracy by stripping out any digital rights management (DRM), was rampant across electronic media.
Poland, where CD Projekt and Good Old Games were founded, had previously been under communist rule but in 1989, the old government had fallen in favor of a more liberal government which spurred economic growth.