Chmielarz started creating games in 1986, when he went to high school. His first experiments in coding did not stand a chance of surviving to this day (in a conversation with Culture.pl, he vividly compares the durability of games recorded on audio tapes to notes made on napkins).
After a period of selling games at a computer market, in 1992 he founded, together with Grzegorz Miechowski – a friend from school – the Metropolis company. The company was responsible for such games – nowadays described in Poland as cult – as The Mystery of the Statuette (1993), Teenagent (1994), and The Prince and the Coward (1998).
In 1999, Chmielarz left Metropolis, and in 2002, he established, together with Andrzej Poznański and Michał Kosieradzki, People Can Fly studio, which in 2004 created Painkiller. The first person shooter met with international success. As Chmielarz explains, the popularity of the game resulted from its quality and from the fact that it offered a ‘joyful massacre.’
When I think about Painkiller, the name of one game making studio comes to mind: Attention to Detail. When we were creating Painkiller, there was no room for compromises in any area: gameplay, music, sound, animation, or graphics – everything had to be absolutely perfect.