We get asked this quite often, just what made me start LGP.

Back in the day, 1999, around august time to be exact, I was working for a fairly horrible company in London. I had been a beta tester on Loki’s Civilisation: Call to Power, but I couldn’t easily buy a copy from anywhere in the UK. Finally, a friend and I ordered it from the states. We waited weeks for the delivery, and finally a month or so after ordering, it arrived.

While I was waiting, I muttered and grumbled while at work about how I didn’t like waiting for weeks for a game, and someone in the office said to me ‘hey, why don’t you start up a company in England then, selling games for Linux.

I thought about it for a bit, and that evening, I registered tuxgames.com

I spent the next few months writing the website. It was a very basic website (some people accuse the current site of being basic, the old one was much much worse). I spent about £300 buying 5 copies each of the 4 Loki games that were available at that time.

Then I was ready, and at 10 seconds past midnight, Jan 1st 2000, the site launched, making us probably the first new company of the new millennium. I wasn’t there to watch it launch, I set up a crontab to remove the pre-launch index.html, and I was up at Colchester Castle watching the millennium fireworks {:-) I got back a couple of hours later and found that it had launched, so I sat back to wait for the orders to come rolling in.

It took days, and I admit I was getting a bit fidgety waiting to see if anyone would order. Mon, 03 Jan 2000 23:42:44 GMT is the timestamp in the database of the first order. For privacy reasons I will not name the individual who was the first to order, but if you ordered then, and you are in Morcambe, Lancs, England, you were our first order. He only ever ordered twice…

I used to run Tux Games more as a sideline while I kept up my day job, it didn’t sell too many copies, but there was a steady flow, and I was enjoying it. We sold mostly Loki titles, but a few others came along occasionally, games like Theocracy, or Reel Deal Slots, or the games from BlackHoleSun. The guys over at linuxgames.com and the Linux Game Tome had both spotted the domain before launch (how they found it, I do not know), and they gave us some great publicity, and really helped us get going.

Throughout 2000, we forged a close relationship with Loki, helping them out with their beta tests (we handled their beta test preorders, as their store was not set up to do it), and we had advance access to most of their releases.

During 2001, Tux Games grew quite quickly, there were three of us doing part time work on the company, and I was set to quit my day job to start on it full time. I had arranged to do that, when Loki started to hit the financial troubles that were to prove its downfall.

Loki almost took Tux Games down with them, when they withdrew our credit line, because they needed the money from us immediately, and we were left needing to find a LOT of money for games that we had sold in preorders, but our credit card processor had not sent us the money for yet. Thanks to a couple of friends who trusted me to max out their credit cards for a couple of weeks, we survived. My friends got their money back, and Tux Games stayed in business. I was fairly annoyed at Loki for breaking their word and putting us in the position though.

Although we never had advance notice that Loki was about to declare bankruptcy, we could kindof feel it in the air. At that point I had quit my job and was working full time on Tux Games, and the horrible thought crossed my mind that, if Loki went under, Tux Games would have nothing left to sell, and I would have to go and get myself a new job! I didn’t like the sound of that at all!

I had heard of a few games that Loki had been talking about maybe porting, and so I got in contact with Creature Labs, and Cyberlore, who were both really quite helpful. We got our first 2 publishing deals, and I launched Linux Game Publishing on Oct 15th 2001, and announced our first title on 12th of November, Creatures: Internet Edition.

LGP was officially in business.