Double Damage Games was founded in 2014 by Travis Baldree and Erich Schaefer, two developers whose names already carried weight with action RPG fans. Schaefer co-founded Condor, the studio that became Blizzard North, where he was one of the lead designers on Diablo and Diablo II, and he later co-founded Flagship Studios. Baldree created the cult action RPG FATE and led Flagship's Seattle team on Mythos before the pair, together with Max Schaefer and Peter Hu, established Runic Games in 2008 and shipped Torchlight and Torchlight II. In March 2014 Baldree and Schaefer left Runic to form Double Damage as a deliberately small, independent outfit based in Washington state, trading the overhead of a large studio for the freedom to build exactly the game they wanted.
That first game was Rebel Galaxy, released for Windows and Mac on October 20, 2015 and on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One the following January: a space adventure that put players in command of a capital ship in a randomly generated frontier, with broadside combat, trading and a soundtrack that quickly became part of its identity. The studio followed it with the prequel Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, launched on August 13, 2019 as a timed Epic Games Store exclusive and expanded to Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 22, 2020, this time swapping the capital ship for a nimble fighter and a cockpit view. Double Damage has been quiet since then, with Baldree building a second career as an audiobook narrator and novelist (his 2022 debut Legends & Lattes became a bestseller), while the studio's catalog remains available and Rebel Galaxy is now published on PC in partnership with the preservation-focused label SNEG.
