People Can Fly

People Can Fly Sp. z o.o.

Type	Private
Industry	Video game industry
Founded	February 2002
Headquarters	Warsaw, Poland
Key people	Sebastian Kamil Wojciechowski
Products	Painkiller Bulletstorm Gears of War: Judgment
Number of employees	60
Website	www.peoplecanfly.com

People Can Fly Sp. z o.o. and for a time known as Epic Games Poland, is a video game developer established in February 2002 by Adrian Chmielarz and based in Warsaw, Poland. Their first video game 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 United States. The team currently consists of 60 members, excluding external contractors.

The name "People Can Fly" was chosen after checking the names of several albums and song titles. On August 20, 2007, Epic Games acquired a majority share in the company. The firm subsequently rebranded itself as Epic Games Poland on November 1, 2013. However on June 24, 2015 it was announced they had become once again independent and they will revert to using their old name and logo.

During an interview for Polish console games magazine Neo Plus, 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 led to an interest in the Unreal Engine, which led 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 led to the formal acquisition.

In August 2008, Epic announced that Electronic Arts would be the publisher of an action title by People Can Fly. In April 2010, it was revealed to be Bulletstorm, a first-person shooter in development with Epic Games. It was originally going to be one of the two titles revealed by Cliff Bleszinski (the other title being Gears of War 3) during his appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, but due to scheduling reasons, the announcement was cancelled.