History of GameMaker: "Game Maker"
1999, summer: The development of Animo, developed in #Delphi by Mark Overmars, a professor at the University of Utrecht, started.
1999, 15 November: V1.1, a simple 2D animation designing tool with a limited visual scripting language, was publicly released. V1.4 made it possible to generate executables. Subsequent releases changed the name to "Game Maker" and moved towards more general-purpose 2D game development.
2000, September: V2.0 was released, which first used #DirectX for sounds, but not graphics.
2001: V3.0 was released and now also used DirectX for graphics. It saved games as
2001, July: V4.0, rewritten from scratch, was released. The GUI was completely revised and took the form that was more or less preserved in later versions. The file extension was changed to
2003, April: V5.0 was released and had a completely new interpreter, making games considerably faster. Although it had been freeware up to v5.0, later versions introduced an optional registration fee.
2004, January: V5.3 introduced many features for registered users, including: particle systems, networking, and DLLs.
2004, October: V6.0 was released. The runtime's drawing pipeline migrated from VCL to Direct3D. This led to sprites, better fonts, primitives, and 3D graphics, but it also broke compatibility. The file extension was changed to .gm6. V6.1 added surfaces.
2007: Growing public interest led Overmars to seek help in expanding the program, which led to partnership with YoYo Games, and Overmars retained a position as one of company's directors.
2007, January: V7.0 was released under the partnership with YoYo Games. It introduced the use of extensions. The file extension was changed to
To create a "YouTube for games", the now archived YoYo Games Sandbox website was created a for uploading and playing Game Maker games, and became quite a success.
2009, December: V8.0 was released. Sprites and the built-in sprite editor were greatly improved, making it much easier to use alpha transparency.
2011, April: V8.1 changed the name to GameMaker (lacking a space) to avoid confusion with the 1991 software Game-Maker. The runtime was rewritten in #CPP to address performance concerns with previous versions. The file extension was changed to
Because of competing projects such as G-Java, G-Creator, LateralGM, etc., the editable game files were encrypted since v.7.0. However, it was not long before the encryptions were broken.
— Summary from game-maker.nl
1999, summer: The development of Animo, developed in #Delphi by Mark Overmars, a professor at the University of Utrecht, started.
1999, 15 November: V1.1, a simple 2D animation designing tool with a limited visual scripting language, was publicly released. V1.4 made it possible to generate executables. Subsequent releases changed the name to "Game Maker" and moved towards more general-purpose 2D game development.
2000, September: V2.0 was released, which first used #DirectX for sounds, but not graphics.
2001: V3.0 was released and now also used DirectX for graphics. It saved games as
.gmf files.2001, July: V4.0, rewritten from scratch, was released. The GUI was completely revised and took the form that was more or less preserved in later versions. The file extension was changed to
.gmd.2003, April: V5.0 was released and had a completely new interpreter, making games considerably faster. Although it had been freeware up to v5.0, later versions introduced an optional registration fee.
2004, January: V5.3 introduced many features for registered users, including: particle systems, networking, and DLLs.
2004, October: V6.0 was released. The runtime's drawing pipeline migrated from VCL to Direct3D. This led to sprites, better fonts, primitives, and 3D graphics, but it also broke compatibility. The file extension was changed to .gm6. V6.1 added surfaces.
2007: Growing public interest led Overmars to seek help in expanding the program, which led to partnership with YoYo Games, and Overmars retained a position as one of company's directors.
2007, January: V7.0 was released under the partnership with YoYo Games. It introduced the use of extensions. The file extension was changed to
.gmk.To create a "YouTube for games", the now archived YoYo Games Sandbox website was created a for uploading and playing Game Maker games, and became quite a success.
2009, December: V8.0 was released. Sprites and the built-in sprite editor were greatly improved, making it much easier to use alpha transparency.
2011, April: V8.1 changed the name to GameMaker (lacking a space) to avoid confusion with the 1991 software Game-Maker. The runtime was rewritten in #CPP to address performance concerns with previous versions. The file extension was changed to
.gm81.Because of competing projects such as G-Java, G-Creator, LateralGM, etc., the editable game files were encrypted since v.7.0. However, it was not long before the encryptions were broken.
— Summary from game-maker.nl