Poland's video game sales are surging, helping to diversify the economy of the export-driven nation. It all started with a computer borrowed from a high school. In the early 1990s, just after the Communist regime collapsed, not many in Poland could afford their own PC. Certainly not the Miechowski brothers, who were born to working-class parents in Lubin, in southwestern Poland. “Grzegorz, my older brother, had some ideas for his first game and wanted to work on them,” Paweł Miechowski, a bearded, focused 40-year-old, tells me. “So he brought the ZX Spectrum from his school.” Some 30 years later, 11 bit studios, a Warsaw-based game development company founded in 2009 by Grzegorz and his high school friend Adrian Chmielarz, was ranked Poland’s third biggest video game company in 2018, with a revenue of over $21 million, four times more than in 2017. Their flagship video games, This War of Mine and Frostpunk, have together sold more than 6 million copies over the world since they were released in 2014 and 2018, respectively. |