There is life after Barry Diller. GarageGames is proving that.
Diller’s IAC bought the company in 2008 but decided to bail out of its InstantAction game business, which included the GarageGames team, in December.
Now the company is born again as a subsidiary of Graham Software Development, an investment company that acquired the Torque business from IAC and is now renaming it GarageGames.
“It’s like a return to our indie roots,” said Eric Preisz, chief executive of GarageGames in in an interview. “We are targeting the independent game developer community.”
The company was started in 2000 as a middleware provider for independent video games. Its Torque game engine sold for just $99, democratizing game development for tens of thousands of “garage” indie developers.
GarageGames has a core team of 24 employees. Its tools can be used to make two-dimensional or 3D games for the PC, Mac, iPhone, Xbox 360, or Wii game console.
If it had a flaw in the past, GarageGames focused too much on programmers. It missed the transition when game tools became much easier to use, allowing designers or artists to do the same work that once required programmers. Preisz said GarageGames will now double-down on making tools for a broader community of creators.
Rivals include Adobe Flash, Unity Technologies, and Epic’s Unreal game engine. GarageGames has about 160,000 users of its Torque engine. And 200 universities and schools use it to teach game design and computer science. Preisz said that GarageGames wasn’t a good fit in the internet-focused portfolio of IAC but that Graham Software understands what GarageGames is all about and is a good new owner.