Metropolis Software

» see metropolis.com.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The first time Metropolis Software meant anything to me was years after it was gone, reading about how The Witcher nearly got made by somebody else in the nineties. In Turkey in that decade you knew games, not studios. A Polish developer's name on a box was not information anyone here had a use for.

Two high school friends started it in Warsaw in 1992. Adrian Chmielarz and Grzegorz Miechowski were making Polish language adventure games for a market that barely existed as a market, and it worked well enough that by the end of 1997 there were twenty people on staff.

They shipped steadily for seventeen years, starting with Tajemnica Statuetki in 1993, which is generally counted as the first Polish adventure game that mattered at home. Gorky 17 in 1999 was the one that got out of Poland, published abroad under a couple of different names depending on the territory.

None of it reached me. Polish games traveled through German and Russian publishing routes rather than through whatever ended up in Turkish shops, and Gorky 17 is the only Metropolis title I could plausibly have crossed paths with without knowing whose it was.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

The studio's internal history has one clean break in it. Around 2002 Chmielarz and Miechowski fell out personally, and Chmielarz left with some of the staff a few months later to start People Can Fly. That studio made Painkiller and eventually ended up inside Epic Games, which is a larger arc than Metropolis ever managed on its own.

Miechowski kept the place running. The Gorky Zero games came out in 2003 and 2004, a ski jumping title in 2005, then Infernal in 2007, which was the last thing Metropolis finished. In February 2008 CD Projekt bought the studio outright.

~ the witcher they did not make ~

Around 1997 Metropolis licensed Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher books for a game. By Chmielarz's account Sapkowski had no particular interest in what a game would be and mostly saw a license fee, which left the studio free to do whatever it wanted with the material.

They built one playable level and press materials, with TopWare attached to publish. Then it stalled. Metropolis had three other projects running and the game itself was proving difficult. TopWare was also not convinced Slavic fantasy would sell outside the region. Chmielarz has said it was never formally cancelled, it just got lost among the other work by 1999. CD Projekt picked the rights up later and shipped The Witcher in 2007. Then it bought the studio that had let them go.

~ the inheritance ~

CD Projekt closed Metropolis on 26 October 2009, twenty months after buying it, and stopped work on They, the shooter the studio had been building. No detailed public reason came with it. The staff were dispersed and the project never resurfaced anywhere.

In October 2010 Miechowski and a group of Metropolis and CD Projekt people announced 11 bit studios with him as managing director. That studio made This War of Mine and later Frostpunk. So the Warsaw shop that could not hold onto The Witcher produced, on its way out, the founders of two of the better known Polish developers working today.

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