Studio Profile
How pirated software and wartime solidarity built Poland’s most principled developer
How pirate ate software and wartime solidarity built Poland’s principled d developer 11 Bit Studios
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 The Witcher’s success – acquired Metropolis, now about 40 people strong, with the intention of marketing its latest project: They. “Which is a lame name,” Miechowski says, “but it was a working title. The real title was Interference.” The game featured highly customisable weapons that you could build yourself from parts. Miechowski was its lead writer; it was a tale of “super-secret powers taking over the world, loosely based on Lost.” Despite being over halfway complete, with the weapons system working, CD Projekt cancelled it in 2009 for business reasons.
“The word ‘indie’ was not often used back then,” Miechowski says. “But our idea was to make indie games in terms of size, but focused on super-original gameplay ideas that mixed genres. But [CD Projekt] was not so much into this idea.” This having now been made quite clear, the majority of Metropolis’ key members left the company. Miechowski was moved over to quest design on The Witcher: Rise Of The White Wolf. He knew nobody, “and I had never worked in the Aurora engine, so I felt kind of lost – I didn’t really know what I was doing. So I decided to leave.” (Shortly afterwards, CD Projekt would shutter Metropolis, too.) With a baby on the way, and few jobs in games to choose from, he began working at a coffee shop to make ends meet. But then, he got a phonecall from his former colleagues. “They said, ‘We’re starting a new company, and we need a writer and marketing guy’.” It was 2010, and 11 Bit Studios (the odd number in the name implying its unorthodox approach to development) was born.
Finally, the team could start to work towards the goal they’d had at CD Projekt “to mix genres, put genres upside-down, just look for new gameplay ideas.” They had sent Miechowski a prototype that inverted the usual structure of a tower-defence game, making it a kind of toweroffence game – it convinced him to come aboard to write the game’s dialogue as well as managing PR and marketing. Anomaly: Warzone Earth released in 2011 when 11 Bit was just 12 people in a flat in Warsaw. “I was in my native environment, with friends I’d been working with for 15 years.” They were all in one room, so communication was simple, and their vision was easily realised. “Plus, we were lucky, because
THE TEAM’S GOAL: “TO MIX GENRES, PUT GENRES UPSIDE-DOWN, JUST LOOK FOR NEW GAMEPLAY IDEAS”
we decided to start an independent team in an era where the market was relatively empty,” Miechowski admits. “There were three, maybe four games released on Steam a week, so each game got the proper visibility.”
Anomaly sold well – even before 11 Bit redesigned it for mobiles, shrinking level sizes and adding in more checkpoints, selling hundreds of thousands of units on the booming App Store and Android Market. Small mobile releases that didn’t require too many resources to make ( Funky Smugglers, Sleepwalker’s Journey, and sequels to Anomaly) formed the basis of their business strategy for the next few years. Anomaly marked a dark point in the studio’s lifetime: “I felt burnt out, and like we were becoming too repetitive. It wasn’t pushing us forward,” Miechowski says. “But when we released Anomaly, we were already in the process of developing a new game called Shelter.” It was a decent survival game, but it lacked a hook. But Gzregorz Miechowski had been reading articles about the survivors of the Bosnian War. “He was struck by how people struggle for simple things, like clean water, food, bandages – things you have everywhere when you’re living in a peaceful country.” With Warsaw’s own bombscarred buildings surrounding us, it’s not difficult to see why the elder Miechowski was so touched by the results of his research. “He said, ‘Let’s make Shelter about this, about civilians in war.’ And that’s how This War Of Mine was born.”
11 Bit’s initial philosophy of turning genres on their heads had served it well, but it had quickly started to feel insufficient. This War Of Mine marked the first time the studio realised it
needed to change its motto: from now on, it would dedicate itself to making meaningful games with social impact. “I remember the meeting when everybody said, ‘This is definitely it – let’s do it’,” Miechowski says. “We knew it was going to be risky.”
The game portrayed its serious subject matter with a raw brutality, and Miechowski was unsure of what the reaction would be. A trip to GDC reassured him that they were on the right path; the reactions from journalists were exceedingly positive. “So when I came back, I literally told the team, ‘Let’s not fuck this up, because we have something special on our hands’,” he laughs. “And I remember the guys, they printed – in Polish, of course – ‘Let’s not fuck this up’, and they stuck it to all the monitors.” Humour became something of a coping mechanism for the studio for the next two years; the research was both intellectually and emotionally gruelling, and there was no guarantee players would understand or even be interested. “Sometimes laughter was a way to fight off the pressure,” Miechowski says. It wasn’t your ordinary launch: the trailer featured testimonial from Emir, a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo. But This War Of Mine was a hit, recouping development costs in just two days, and winning countless awards. 11 Bit had found its calling. “We were reassured that that driving philosophy is something we really want to go for. You’re not only making a piece of entertainment, but something with a message. And if we can change at least one person’s mind because of a game, then hell, it’s worth it.”
11 Bit started publishing games in 2014, a savvy business move that has contributed much to the large, modern building Miechowski gives us a tour of the next day (it’s currently planning to move into an even bigger space a few kilometres down the road). But difficult-second-album syndrome set in with the next in-house project.
The prototype wasn’t inspiring the studio – nor Jakub Stokalski, who would eventually become the project’s lead after joining in 2015. “There was nothing that really gripped us,” he says, as we study a bleakly beautiful diorama of the house in 11 Bit’s defining title. “This War Of Mine and the success that came with it changed the playing field for the company. After that, there was really no going back to doing just small, fun match-three games. Not to disrespect any genre, but for us, as a studio, it wouldn’t fit any more.” It was only at the end of 2015, when Stokalski saw a concept document portraying a world undergoing global cooling (the player must build their city around a generator to keep warm, and makes tough moral decisions to keep their society both alive and functional) that he was convinced that this could be a game worthy of 11 Bit.
For the studio, it’s about ensuring they don’t settle for the easy answer. “It’s like, this process of asking ‘Why?’ five times,” Stokalski says. “This is what kids do, and it’s a useful way of looking at things. By the end of the day, you can end up in a very strange place,” he laughs. “Other times, you arrive at things that are true and not trivial – which is the sweet spot we’re always trying to shoot for.” Lead artist Łukasz Juszczyk impresses on us the importance of creating a “mood” for the studio’s games. “It’s the place where design clicks with art. And knowing that really helps ease the tension between developers on each level, because we are all aware of what we want to do, and it spreads to the whole team.”
He recalls such tensions back in 2015; once Frostpunk’s message clicked – and Marta Fijak pulled the team through the hardest part of dev, which was balancing the society’s mechanical and tonal subtleties – there was no stopping its success. It sold over 250,000 copies in its first three days, and 1.4 million within a year.
Fijak, inspired by socially conscious games such as This War Of Mine and Papers, Please, left a job making free-to-play mobile games to work at 11 Bit. “I was passionate about those games that wanted to tell something more, something important. It doesn’t have to be depressing! But just something more worthwhile.”
Indeed, she’s aware that they are in danger of being pegged as “the depression people. Meaningfulness is not only hidden in painful emotions or stories of sacrifice; there are things that are meaningful in day-to-day life that are not as bleak and depressing.” She’s leading 11 Bit’s next game (working title Project 8), which is about to go into pre-production, and is “a celebration of a part of life – there are parts that are grim, but it’s brighter than Frostpunk and This War Of Mine.” Stokalski grins: “There’s this running question around the company: ‘How would you make a comedy game?’ Funny in a meaningful way, you know. It’s still an unanswered question. But some of the most profound things are being said through comedy.” It might be mid-afternoon and dark already in Warsaw, but 11 Bit’s future looks bright.
“IF WE CAN CHANGE AT LEAST ONE PERSON’S MIND BECAUSE OF A GAME, THEN HELL, IT’S WORTH IT”