Epic Games today announced that it has acquired a majority interest in Warsaw, Poland-based game developer People Can Fly. People Can Fly is best known for creating the hit PC game, Painkiller, but most recently has been collaborating with Epic on the PC version of Gears of War. In addition the two companies are collaborating on a new intellectual property which Epic will be previewing privately to publishers at Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany this week.

The relationship began last year when People Can Fly was evaluating Unreal Engine 3 to use for a new multi-platform game project. People Can Fly is a 50-person game development studio founded in February 2002 and located in Warsaw, Poland. PCF's team is composed of industry veterans, with experience dating back to 1993.

PCF's first game - Painkiller - turned out to be a great success. After releasing Painkiller in April 2004, the team worked on online community support, then started the work on PK's Expansion Pack called Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, which was finished in only five months and released end of November 2004. After the expansion pack had gone gold, PCF started working on their first console project - Painkiller: Hell Wars (Xbox). The game was released in July 2006.