Piracy business and amateur game development Born in
Lubin on April 9, 1971, Adrian Chmielarz moved into game development in a roundabout way. In 1985, at the age of 14, Chmielarz attended the first
Polcon science fiction convention in
Błażejewko, where he first discovered an affinity for computers. He soon went through a
Star Wars fan phase that saw him interact with a computer for the first time. By the late 1980s, he had become fascinated with computer games such as
Knight Lore and
Bugsy by reading about them in
Przegląd Techniczny. The Wrocław marketplace where such goods were sold often had access to newer titles earlier. According to Chmielarz "many people would buy games, if only it would be possible." While he had a computer engineering company, the times were getting tougher and only giants with big money could survive on the market. Chmielarz decided to leave his profitable business and study at
Wrocław University of Technology. However, he became bored and left without finishing his degree; he would later regret wasting his time at university. By 1990, Chmielarz had his own computers and his obsession led to him playing and making games all the free time. Founding the video game development studio
People Can Fly in 2002, he went on to create the successful first-person shooter
Painkiller (2004) and its follow-ups
Painkiller: Battle Out of Hell (2004),
Painkiller: Hell Wars (2006), and
Painkiller: Hell & Damnation (2012). A partnership with
Epic Games and the work on the
Gears of War series of third-person shooters, in which he personally went from a multiplayer level designer for the first two games to being the original creative director of
Gears of War: Judgment (2013), led to Epic acquiring People Can Fly in 2007 and the creation of their next first-person shooter,
Bulletstorm (2011). After leaving People Can Fly (by then fully owned by Epic) in 2012, Chmielarz formed the independent video game studio
The Astronauts, which developed and published its debut game, the first-person adventure
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter in 2014. His next game and a return to the first-person shooter genre,
Witchfire, is to be released "when it's done". Chmielarz has also written commentary articles for Polish video game magazines, including his monthly columns "Gawędy bez fai" and "Gawędy po fai" in
Secret Service and
NEO+. In English, he has written blogs at
Gamasutra and
Medium. == Games ==