Celebrating 10 years of posting that one image of Geralt in a bathtub

It's 2017, and I'm in Warsaw, visiting CD Projekt Red to play its new game, a standalone, multiplayer version of Gwent. Before I'm allowed to do that, though, I'm asked a question by the studio's PR manager… one that's clearly been puzzling him for well over a year: "Why do you keep posting images of Geralt in the bath?"

At the time I didn't have a good answer.

Still, as the person who is perhaps most responsible for kicking off what Know Your Meme calls "Geralt in a Bathtub"—personally I prefer Tub Geralt—the game's 10th anniversary feels like as good a time as any to try to explain.

Tub Geralt's first appearance on the internet was on May 12, 2015—a week before the release of The Witcher 3—courtesy of PC Gamer's former online editor Tom Senior. It's a tweet that is criminally underappreciated for a piece of history—the origin of this all.

It's what I like to think of as a classic Tom Senior move—taking a screenshot of exactly the right frame of a game cutscene to produce something that, in isolation, is funny.

A month later, the image made its way onto PC Gamer for the first time—proudly propping up a story about The Witcher 3 selling four million copies. An inauspicious start—a small, inconsequential news story about a game doing well—but that's precisely why it was the right image for the job. Writing gaming news can be a thankless task, and my coping mechanism was to find ways to amuse myself.

This did not always work. Months before posting Tub Geralt, I spent a not insignificant amount of time creating a mascot for posts about gaming deals—the Sale Stoat. This proved maybe too weird and too high concept for the regular commenters of the day. Tub Geralt, though? He demands attention. This is, when all is said and done, a provocative image. Those feet glisten—threatening to make you feel some kinda way. It was only natural that people reacted.

The comments from that article are long since lost to time and changing platforms, but it did get a reaction. Over the years, some have assumed that we kept posting Tub Geralt purely because of the negative feedback—the many replies we'd get from people clearly uncomfortable with naked male flesh on their Twitter feeds.

Really, though, when you're an attention starved news writer, any reaction will do. Whether they thought it was funny or gross—whether they were in on the joke or not—they were commenting. And so I kept posting the image. And so did PCG's other writers.

Arguably the image served a practical purpose too. The Witcher 3 was an incredibly successful game, and so it was one we wrote about a lot. And a good article header image can be hard to find. It should be a prominent character that commands attention, ideally making eye contact with the reader. Plus, in the early days, when the primary reaction was still one of bafflement and annoyance, Tubposting became a fun little game. For instance, see if you can find the Tub Geralt in this news story from August of 2015.

Eventually the wider world cottoned on to what we were doing. Other gaming sites had already started deploying occasional Tub Geralts—dipping their toe into the waters to see how it felt. And a viral tweet in 2016—now deleted—seemed to tip the scales, with its collage of angry tweet replies alongside the caption: "PC Gamer repeatedly using the 'bathtub Geralt' picture rustled some people and it's amazing".

It was around this time that the general mood around Tub Geralt started to shift. Increasingly, people would get annoyed when we didn't post a Tub Geralt, and instead dared to illustrate some Witcher 3 news with a regular picture of a clothed RPG action hero.

Eventually even CD Projekt Red itself got in on the fun. No doubt there are some at the studio who would have preferred if the world's biggest PC gaming website hadn't chosen to inexorably tie its discussions of the game to an image of a half-naked rendition of its protagonist. There may even have been a small lingering element of exasperation to be found in the 2021 WicherCon video that touches briefly on the phenomenon.

But ultimately, I hope, CDPR recognises Tub Geralt for what it is: The celebration of the studio's singular protagonist. It works because Geralt—whatever form he's in, from book to game to TV show—is so well defined and characterised. You could plop a lot of gaming characters in a lot of baths, and very few of them would feel so endearingly entertaining. Very few would make it to meme status. There's a reason CDPR chose to make the bathtub cutscene in the first place, after all. It fits.

Just a few months after my trip to Poland in 2017, CDPR embraced Tub Geralt by making him real—sending us a statue of Tub Geralt relaxing with his copy of PC Gamer magazine. This was maybe the first time I wondered if my little running joke had gone too far. It would not be the last.

In 2019, the showrunner for Netflix's adaptation of The Witcher, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, was asked if there would be a bathtub scene in the show. There was. After the first season aired, actor, game enjoyer and bather Henry Caville was asked about the scene, telling BBC Radio 1, "When I was getting into the bath, I was sitting there thinking 'I wonder if anyone knows how much this is going to explode, this particular scene.'"

For me, perhaps the most bizarre moment of all came in 2022, when contestants for Netflix's absurdly entertaining baking show Nailed It! were asked to bake a Tub Geralt. This, both chronologically and philosophically, felt like some kind of end point. A butterfly flaps its wings; a tired news writer posts a funny picture his colleague had taken; three amateur bakers flail around as they attempt to render a mid-soak Geralt out of cake in a studio in Burbank.

The part I played in Tub Geralt will likely be my major legacy on the internet. If I was a more serious man, that would probably contribute to some kind of extended midlife crisis. But much in the way that Geralt has become a sort of elder statesman for PC gaming—one of the many enduring mascots of our weird gaming platform—Tub Geralt is now part of PC Gamer's furniture. We don't post him nearly as much, but he still crops up from time to time. Over the years he's made his way into nearly everything we've done—he's even featured prominently as part of our recommendations page on CD Projekt's distribution service GOG. We were told we could pick something that represents our brand. I think there's no better choice.

"Why do you keep posting images of Geralt in the bath?" In 2017 I didn't have a good answer. In 2025, I could attempt to argue that, as the internet continues to contract down into AI slop and crumbling social platforms, that it's important to hold onto the things that show your history and personality—that make you stand out. Really, though? It's just a funny picture. It never needed to be any deeper than that.