At the end of last week, the GameMaker team celebrated the engine's 25th birthday: its first version was released on November 15, 1999.
As the engine's creators recall on the official blog, GameMaker has come a long way in a quarter of a century. Initially, it was released under the name Amino. The engine's creator, Mark Overmars, a professor at Utrecht University, developed the tool primarily for fellow educators and students. However, as GameMaker's functionality expanded, game developers began using it extensively.
Since 2007, YoYo Games has been developing GameMaker. In 2021, the company became part of Opera.
Today, GameMaker allows for the creation of games for mobile devices, web platforms, PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. For instance, it has been used in the development of games like Katana Zero, Hyper Light Drifter, Loretta, Hotline Miami, Momodora, Nuclear Throne, UNDERTALE, and many others.
In 2021, YoYo Games launched GX.games, a platform with indie games made using GameMaker, which now hosts over 9,500 projects.
In discussing the engine's 25th anniversary, YoYo Games did not share new statistics on GameMaker's audience, leaving the current user count unclear. In the fall of 2023, the company noted that after its acquisition by Opera, the active user base of the engine tripled. It is also known that its audience began to significantly grow at the end of last year because GameMaker became free for non-commercial use across all platforms except consoles.
In celebration of the anniversary, YoYo Games released a free game on GX.games and Steam called GameMaker 25th Anniversary — it's a studio management simulator where players create their own engine. Later, YoYo Games plans to make all of the project's source code publicly available.