2009 – GameSalad Year One In Review

January 1 2010, 9:06pm

Welcome to THE FUTURE…Future…future… As old year closes and another begins, the GameSalad team would like to thank ya’ll (we’re from Austin, so we can say such things) for helping GameSalad get to where it is today. Here’s a quick recap of all that we’ve accomplished this year:

In January, GameSalad became the tool of choice for The University of Texas at Austin’s first interdisciplinary game design class.

Our company Gendai Games moved into bigger offices thanks to Midnight Studios.

During SXSW Interactive in March, GameSalad opened its virtual doors to the public and launched our beta program.

GameSalad presented at the Worlds in Motion Summit during the 2009 Game Developers Conference.

We presented at SFNewTech in March and were voted the audience favorite.

Over the summer we held our first internship program, where our interns created 16 games in 15 weeks. Two of which, Spark of Life and Ninja Rock Paper Scissors were published to the iPhone App Store.

GameSalad was chosen as the game creation tool for Austin ISD / Skillpoint Alliance’s GameOn! program in June. 20 high school students created 10 games in just one month!

In August, Gendai Games joined the Austin Technology Incubator.

On September 3, GameSalad was featured on the front page of Apple’s download site and was chosen as a “Staff Pick” by Apple, fueling massive growth in our community.

On September 23, we launched our iPhone Early Access program, allowing GameSalad creators to test and build iPhone games.

By the first of October, the first game “made with GameSalad” found its way onto the iPhone App Store.

On December 21, we teamed up with Macworld 2010 to run the GameSalad Challenge.

Since launch, GameSalad Creator has been downloaded over 32,000 times by Mac users all around the globe. The GameSalad community has grown to over 20,000 members that have contributed nearly 1,000 games to GameSalad.com. Our Express and Pro GameSalad members have now launched over 75 games on the iPhone app store, 4 of which have been featured by Apple. Over the course of the year GameSalad has been mentioned on BusinessWeek, Macworld, TUAW, Joystiq, The Guardian and ReadWriteWeb. And this year is going to be even better! In 2010, we encourage you to “Create Something Revolutionary!” The Macworld 2010 GameSalad Challenge will culminate in an awards ceremony at Macworld. We’ll be putting the finishing touches on GameSalad 1.0, and we will have plenty of other great things in the pipeline! We can toot our own horn today, because YOU were there to help us. Thank you so much for your support. Let’s raise a glass to a revolutionary new year! Happy New Year, Everyone! The GameSalad Team