Techland

Techland is a Polish developer and publisher headquartered in Wrocław, with another office in Warsaw. Its founder, Paweł Marchewka, born in 1973 in Ostrów Wielkopolski, began distributing video games to shops around Poland with friends while still at secondary school. In 1991, when Poland changed its intellectual property laws, he turned that business into Techland. At first it translated foreign software and released it on the Polish market; in 1993 it began making its own products, such as dictionaries, translation tools and games.

Its first in-house game was Prawo Krwi (1995). In 2003 it released Chrome, a science-fiction first-person shooter that debuted its own Chrome Engine, followed in 2005 by the prequel Chrome: Specforce. It also made driving games such as Xpand Rally and the Volkswagen-licensed GTI-Racing (2006). Then came the westerns Call of Juarez (2006) and its prequel Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (2009), which introduced the fourth version of the engine.

In 2011 it released Dead Island, an open-world survival horror game, followed in 2013 by Dead Island: Riptide. That year it opened Digital Scapes Studios in Vancouver, Canada, which it sold to CD Projekt in July 2021. Dying Light (2015), a first-person survival horror game, got the expansion The Following (2016) and a sequel, Dying Light 2: Stay Human (2022). In 2017 it made its debut as a publisher with Torment: Tides of Numenera, and in 2018 it became the sole publisher of Call of Juarez: Gunslinger after a dispute with Ubisoft.

In July 2023 Tencent announced it would become Techland's majority shareholder with a 67% stake, while the studio would keep its creative independence and control of its brands. Today it works on a new engine, C-Engine, which it built to deliver far more detailed graphics. It continues to support Dying Light 2 and is developing an open-world fantasy role-playing game that it describes as its biggest project yet.