Facepunch Studios was founded by Garry Newman in June 2004 for the forthcoming release of Facewound. Newman and his collaborators intended to use this studio name instead of one of their personal names to appear more professional. The name "Facepunch" came from the brainstorming of names for the gameFacewound – where something "stupidly macho" was required. Two names were chosen at the end: Facepunch and Facewound. Facewound was used for the game, but Facepunch was deemed "too funny sounding to just leave to die" – and so was used as the name for the company. In 2004, Garry Newman started the development of Garry's Mod, originally a side project, which eventually took over the Facewound forum as well as most of Newman's time. Facewound was later postponed and cancelled, and Facepunch Studio disbanded. Garry's Mod has become the flagship game of Facepunch Studios, and by November 2013 the game had sold 3.5 million copies, regularly being one of the top played Steam games, having been released near Steam's inception. The studio has 20 employees working on Rust and five people are working on prototypes like Deuce or Space Game.
''Garry's Mod''
Garry Newman has not been formally trained as a computer programmer. Garry's Mod started out as a sandbox mode for tinkering in Valve's Source engine. Not truly considered a video game, and more of a playground, the game takes assets from Valve's own video games like Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, etc., and allows users to pose them with different tools offered by Garry's Mod. As of January 2016 the game has sold 10 million copies.
''Rust''
Rust is an online multiplayer survival game, based on games such as Minecraft and DayZ. Rusts inception stemmed from Facepunch's frustration with DayZs gameplay; inheriting its cruel player versus player model and Minecrafts crafting and building aspects. Rusts grand concept was to develop a game where the players would be able to mold the environment: hunting, scavenging, gathering, and looting for survival; and players themselves impeding or assisting each other's success. Although the game has been criticised for being too brutal, Facepunch Studios has intimated that an artificial scoreboard, encouraging players to "play nice", would be to the detriment of the game: "There shouldn't be a system hanging around forcing people to be good. It removes a lot of gameplay fun." Rust sold over 150,000 copies in its first two weeks. Garry's Mod, in comparison, only sold 34,000 in two weeks. By 2017, it had sold over five million. The game officially released out of early access in February 2018. Facepunch officially stopped selling the Linux version of Rust in July 2018. Facepunch does still support the Linux version.
''Before''
On 24 September 2014, Garry Newman announced that Facepunch Studios would be taking on prehistoric simulation gameBefore to develop. Before was being created by Bill Lowe under the company. On 21 February 2019 Bill Lowe from Facepunch, who previously worked on the game, confirmed on Twitter that the game project had been cancelled.
