[5] Chmielarz was pushed by a desire to buy a computer with his own money, knowing that his parents had been forced into the black market to "put food on the table".
[5] In 1987, Chmielarz earned financial sustainability by traveling 40 miles each day to sell bootleg foreign films on VHS tapes, copied from a friend at a bazaar in Wrocław (such type of copyright infringement was not illegal in Poland until 1994).
[1] He noted that while an Englishman could buy a game the day of release, the average Pole would often have to wait up to five weeks and become impatient during that time, leading to this natural solution.
[5] After picking them up, to get an advantage over his competitors at the bazaar, he would add subroutines to alter gameplay (such as changing the number of lives or adding invulnerability); he would also himself crack the games and then apply his own anti-piracy protection measures to prevent other pirates from copying and selling it.
[4] In 1992, Adrian Chmielarz and Grzegorz Miechowski co-founded video game developing and publishing company Metropolis Software.
The group realised that they could fill a gap in the untapped Polish software market, in which hundreds of thousands of people owned computers but were unable to become fully immersed in adventure games as they did not understand English.
A partnership with Epic Games and the work on the Gears of War series of third-person shooters, in which he personally went from a multiplayer level designer for the first two games to being the original creative director of Gears of War: Judgment (2013), led to Epic acquiring People Can Fly in 2007 and the creation of their next first-person shooter, Bulletstorm (2011).