Saying Goodbye

After more than 10 years together as a team, it is with a heavy heart that we lay Green Thumbs Interactive to rest.

We started out simple - just a group of friends, a bunch of computer nerds looking to mess around with whatever technology we could get our hands on. We were all only just finishing highschool then, so we'd get together after class, to hang out, game and make cool things. We got really into modding at that time - it was our first real experience making anything similar to a full game.

And by God, did we love it. We must've spent hundreds of hours working on our first fully fleshed-out System Shock mod. And we only got more hooked from there.

Our history as a proper company started with puzzle games. Throughout college, we were all huge point-and-click adventure fans - and that's what we started out developing. In our minds, we'd release something like the next Myst someday (LOL).

However, we didn't let ourselves get defined by genre - and this led to us receiving what we thought would be the career opportunity of a lifetime. When we released Explorer Knight, a puzzle game that played around with some RPG mechanics and stylings, we were unexpectedly reached out to by a game publisher with a proposal.

The task? We'd be making an RPG. We're all longtime Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts, so you can imagine the type of excitement that filled our then-studio (which was just the garage of one of our grandmas). The first Baldur's Gate had just been released and we were all absolutely obsessed with it - and the general feeling was "We should totally make something like this". We were young and inexperienced and completely in over our heads - but we had just gotten recognition from a proper publisher, and we were brimming with enthusiasm.

Wildernis, or Project Goatman as we referred to it at first, was the project of a lifetime. It consumed everything and anything - for the next few years, we lived and breathed nothing but our beloved little RPG. Development was agonizingly slow - we had to learn from our own mistakes over and over again, and scrap our whole progress multiple times. The work was tough - but the promise of our baby being the fantasy game of the new millenium kept us afloat.

Of course, we now know that was never going to happen. Once again - we were in way over our heads. In the end, our passion was not enough for us to deliver. First came the delays, then disappointment set in. Ultimately, we parted ways with the publisher - and just couldn't cross the finish line. By then, the budget had run out and we all desperately needed to get our lives back on track. Some of us were pursuing further education, some were offered jobs, some had young families to feed. To put it simply, Wildernis had bled us dry - many of us just wanted to move on.

So, here's to the end of Green Thumbs Interactive. Here's to many years of wonderful friendship and creative partnership - and to many beautiful new beginnings.

It's been pretty cool. Thank you all for your support.

-Emm, Lurch & Pandorah, and the whole Green Thumbs Interactive team