11 Bit Studios

How pirated software and wartime solidarity built Poland’s most principled developer

- Jen Simpkins

Winter has arrived in Warsaw, a city that needs no further encouragement to look surly. But our welcome to 11 Bit Studios couldn’t be warmer: over beer and pierogi, Paweł Miechowski speaks fondly of his country, and of the studio he’s been a part of since before it was even called 11 Bit.

Metropolis Software was one of the very first game-development studios in Poland: “There were like, ten studios in the country, and compared to the west there was no real knowhow of how to make games – just passion, and love,” he tells us. The studio was co-founded by Adrian Chmielarz and Miechowski’s brother, Gzregorz: its first game was Tajemnica Statuetki, or The Mystery Of The Statuette, which was released in 1991, two years after communism collapsed. It was a breakthrough moment for Poland, for Metropolis – and for the 17-year-old Miechowski, who spent much of his time hanging around “the older guys” at the studio when he wasn’t at school, helping them box up games on 3.5-inch disks. One day, Miechowski’s brother asked if he could help to render animations on a game they were making called The Prince And The Coward. “I was putting them together in ProAnimator, or something like this?” he tells us. “An illegal copy, because a) there were no legal copies on the market and b) we were too poor to afford legal copies, for sure.”

While Metropolis continued to make games – even bagging, then selling to Polish publisher CD Projekt, the rights to make a game based on a certain fantasy novel series called The Witcher – Miechowski attended university. He returned in 2003 to join the team full-time. Chmielarz had recently left following a disagreement with his studio co-founder. In 2007, CD Projekt – now the biggest player in the Polish game industry thanks to