Introversion Software

The company was founded in 2001 by three friends, Chris Delay, Mark Morris, and Thomas Arundel, who met as undergraduates at Imperial College London. The company originally labelled itself "the last of the bedroom programmers" due to the trio working out of their homes - they moved into an office when working on their fourth game, Multiwinia. Their first released video game, Uplink, was programmed and designed almost exclusively by Chris, while Mark and Tom handled marketing, materials and the other business elements. Their small initial investment enabled them to buy CD-Rs and printer cartridges. Early copies of the game were handmade. The company was able to fully make back their investment within a few hours of accepting orders. A large community formed and the team, along with a new programmer Andy Bainbridge, started work on two new games.

Darwinia was released to much critical acclaim and was eventually re-released via Steam on 14 July 2005. On 29 September 2006, Introversion Software launched its third game, DEFCON. Shortly after, Introversion had measured their bandwidth in terabytes for the first time. After the release of DEFCON, Introversion began work on a game called Subversion. Their next game, however, was Multiwinia, a multiplayer follow-up to Darwinia, and was released on 19 September 2008.

Darwinia and Multiwinia were ported for the Xbox 360. This resulted in the eventual release of Darwinia+, which included both games, to the Xbox Live Arcade on 10 February 2010.

After the release of Multiwinia in 2008, Introversion announced the commencement of working on a game called Subversion in December of that year. This was followed by a series of blog-posts about the development of the game and its procedurally generated urban areas and the game was shown at the World of Love event in 2010. In October 2011, after three years in development, Subversion was announced as delayed.

Their new game was announced as Prison Architect during the Humble Indie Bundle release of Introversion games and tech demos of Subversion material, along with a treasure hunt of information on the new game hidden within the tech demos.