Prior to founding Renegade Kid, Gregg Hargrove and Jools Watsham had been working together for 12–13 years, starting at Iguana Entertainment. The two launched Renegade Kid in early 2007. Hargrove and Watsham incorporated their expertise in Nintendo 64game development into Renegade Kid's projects, and Watsham described the Nintendo DS, which would become the studio's primary target platform, as "basically a portable N64". The studio's first game, , was announced on March 5, 2007, and found Gamecock Media Group as its publisher by June. At that time, Renegade Kid had three employees. In March 2012, Renegade Kid and Gamescribe jointly announced PitchWinPlay, a competition in which people could pitch their game ideas to the two companies, the winning entry would be developed as a game for the Nintendo eShop. However, the following July, Gamescribe announced that it was shutting down and PitchWinPlay was canceled. Also in 2012, Renegade Kid released Mutant Mudds, the first game it funded and published on its own. Afterward, Renegade Kid went back to cooperating with publishers. The studio arranged a publishing deal for a licensed game in which the publisher would grant Renegade Kid a budget of but only allocated of those, keeping the remaining locked down until the later stages of the game's development. This meant that any financial risk the publisher could have faced would have been shifted to the developer instead. Renegade Kid rejected the deal and, from that point on, turned its business model entirely to indie game development. Renegade Kid's 2014 game Moon Chronicles sold poorly and the studio struggled to survive. The situation stabilized following the release of Xeodrifter, but running the studio still proved to be a financial challenge for Hargrove and Watsham. As a result, the two decided to split up. On August 29, 2016, Renegade Kid announced that it was shutting down. The intellectual property rights were divided between the companies set up by Hargrove and Watsham independently: Atooi, founded by Watsham in 2015, obtained the rights for Renegade Kid's two-dimensional games, while Infitizmo, which was established in 2016 by Hargrove, received the three-dimensional titles.
