People Can Fly

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People Can Fly

Type	Subsidiary
Founded	Warsaw, Poland (2002)
Headquarters	Warsaw, Poland
Key people	Adrian Chmielarz
Products	Painkiller Painkiller: Battle out of Hell Gears of War PC version
Parent	Epic Games
Website	People Can Fly official site

People Can Fly is a videogame developer established in February 2002 by Adrian Chmielarz and based in Warsaw, Poland. Their first videogame was Painkiller, but many of their members had already worked on various titles before this. Some members helped create 10 different titles since 1992, with the best known being Gorky 17, or Odium in the USA. The team currently consists of 20 members, excluding external contractors.

The name "People Can Fly" was chosen after checking the names of several albums and song titles. On August 20th 2007, Epic Games acquired a majority share in the company ^[1].

During an interview for Polish console games magazine Neo+, Adrian Chmielarz described Epic's acquisition of People Can Fly as a multi-step process. Facing issues with extending its proprietary engine, People Can Fly considered using a third party solution. This lead to an interest in the Unreal Engine, which lead to contacting Epic Games. After presenting a demo to Epic Games, People Can Fly was hired to create additional content for the PC version of Gears of War. Impressed with the quality of the collaboration, Epic decided to shift the PC porting effort to the studio. The success of the Gears of War port lead to the formal acquisition^[2].