be observed during a meeting with the main opponent, performing a magical ritual in a fiery circle made of birthday candles. According to Miechowski, the game was made with the motto "Teach with fun, play with learning", and this educational slant was acknowledged by Nie tylko Wiedźmin, which said the game is responsible for its players, decades later, knowing how to make good cocktails as the result of its in-game puzzle. Chmielarz's design philosophy was to create a game similar to those released in the West; according to Komputers Wait, at the time of the game's development, the Polish computer industry was five years behind that of the West, and Polish titles were generally clones of then-popular Western video games. Tajemnica Statuetki is comparable to late 1980s adventure games. Secret Service agreed, saying the game visually resembles point-and-click adventure Countdown (1990) and interactive fiction adventure Amazon (1984) due to their similar menu systems and use of digitized images. Many critics acknowledged the limitations of the game in terms of the size of the country's video gaming industry at the time. One magazine reminded its readers not to make comparisons between the game and the latest titles from adventure gaming giants like Sierra On-Line, LucasArts, Infogrames, and Delphine, due to the "tremendous" gaps in "experience, financial and technological resources, infrastructure, and legal protection" that would gradually close. Release Development of Tajemnica Statuetki was finished by February 12, 1993; at the end of that year the game was released onto the market at a price of 231,000 Polish zlotys. During the game's development, the team approached publishers Atlantis Software and Avalon Interactive (then called Virgin Interactive) but were turned down. Chmielarz got IPS Computer Group to distribute and market it but the company agreed to take only 100 copies rather than the 2,000 the creators had offered; as a result, Chmielarz founded his own company to sell the rest of the stock. The name of his publishing company, Metropolis Software, was chosen because "it sounded nice". Founded in 1992 in preparation for the game's release the following year, it became one of the first Polish video game companies after contemporaries such as Computer Adventure, Studio, and X-Land. Chmielarz boxed the games in packaging he had designed himself. Each box contained two HD floppy disks with the program and extra material. The latter included a copy of the fictional newspaper Dziennik Metropolis dated