Facepunch Studios is the British developer and publisher behind two of the most enduring sandboxes on PC - Garry's Mod and Rust. Garry Newman founded the studio in June 2004, and it was formally incorporated on March 17, 2009. The name comes from the team's first planned game, Facewound. The team wanted a studio name rather than a personal one so the outfit would look more professional, so they brainstormed deliberately "stupidly macho" names and kept two. Facewound went to the game. Facepunch was judged too funny sounding to let die, so it became the company name. Facewound was later postponed and cancelled, but a side project Newman started that same year went on to define the studio. Garry's Mod began as a sandbox for tinkering inside Valve's Source engine. It gave players the assets of Source games such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, plus the tools to pose and combine them into anything from screenshot comics and machinima to full player-made game modes. It launched close to Steam's own beginnings and has regularly ranked among the platform's most played games, with more than 20 million copies sold by September 2021. Its long life owes as much to its community of builders and mode makers as to the studio itself.
Rust grew out of the studio's frustration with DayZ. It pairs that game's cruel player-versus-player survival with Minecraft-style crafting and base building. It entered Steam Early Access in December 2013 and sold over 150,000 copies in its first two weeks, against the 34,000 Garry's Mod managed in the same span. During Early Access the game moved to the Unity 5 engine and swapped its zombies for dangerous wildlife. It passed five million sales by March 2017 and reached full release on February 8, 2018. Facepunch has kept updating it ever since on a monthly Force Wipe cycle, which lands on the first Thursday of each month. Paid packs have followed too, including the Instruments Pack, whose playable instruments work with real MIDI devices. A partnership with Double Eleven that began in 2016 brought Rust Console Edition to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in May 2021, and native PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions followed in June 2025. The studio has also shipped smaller experiments. Clatter, a one-on-one turn-based strategy game fought with battle robots, arrived in December 2018. Chippy, a twin-stick bullet-hell shooter with destructible bosses, came out of the Facepunch Prototypes program in 2019. Meanwhile s&box, the spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, moved from Unreal Engine 4 to Valve's Source 2 engine in 2020 and uses C# for user-created content and game modes. Still headquartered in Birmingham, with more than 50 staff as of March 2023, Facepunch makes games that hand players the tools and leave the stories to them. Rust, playable today on Windows and macOS, is the sharpest example of that approach.
