Facepunch Studios

Facepunch Studios LTD (Facepunch) is an independent video game developer and software developer based in Walsall, UK. Facepunch was unofficially founded in 2004 by Garry Newman, during the development of a Survival horror game named Facewound. It was officially founded on 17/03/2009 when it was registered as an LTD at Companies House.

The company's most famous product is Garry's Mod, a sandbox mod for the Source Engine from Valve Corporation.

Headquarters
Until 2nd March 2010, Facepunch's official headquarters was Garry Newman's apartment. Since then they have been based in their offices on floor 10, Tameway Tower in Walsall, West Midlands, UK.

Company Name
The name Facepunch came about during the development of Facewound. Garry Newman said on his blog:

"We had to come up with a hardass name for Facewound, and we were shooting the shit and nearby [Maurino Berry] came up with Facewound and Facepunch. Then someone said Facewound by Facepunch Studios and it was decided."

On the Facewound website, it says that the name was created, as it would look unprofessional to release the game under one of the developers names, and could detract from sales.

Products
Facepunch Studios have currently have 3 products:

Garry's Mod
Garry's Mod was originally released in 2005 for free, and was later commercially released in 2006 on the Steam service.

GWEN
GWEN is an open source GUI Widget Toolkit, aimed at video game developers, with the emphasis on being small, simple and easy to integrate. It is designed to be a replacement for other GUI solutions which tend to come with "baggage" in the form of Font renders, XML parsers or HTML renderers etc.

GWEN is not yet fully released and is currently only officially available from an Anonymous SVN assessable from the Downloads page of the GWEN website.

Facewound
Facewound was the first product created by Facepunch, but was never fully completed, instead being released for free. This is largely put down to the fact that Garry's Mod had taken priority over the game, due to it's unprecedented success.

The game is a 2D side scrolling survival horror, in which you use a variety of high powered weaponry to cross a landscape of zombies.

Services
As well as having a dedicated website for each of it's products (listed below), Facepunch Studios also provides a dedicated Free download website for Garry's Mod, Garrysmod.org. To use this service a genuine copy of Garry's Mod linked to a Steam account is required.

Facepunch Forums
Facepunch Studios run the Facepunch forums. While these forums do include help and discussion areas for Facepunch's products, they also include areas for discussion for other subjects including: news, film, television, video games, technology and art.

As of 18th of August 2010, the forums have 166,752 members, of which 29,764 have been active in the last 30 days.