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Garry Newman doesn't really dress things up. You'd likely have guessed that much from the name of the game that earned him his fortune. Garry's Mod, the sandbox created from Valve's Source engine that has supported Newman for coming up to a decade, is a brilliantly blunt bit of titling. That much you'd also get from a brief phone conversation with him one sunny Tuesday morning, his flat West Midlands firmly placing him in his Walsall base. It's an office still reeling from the shock of the success of Rust, Newman and the team at Facepunch's first public-facing offering since Garry's Mod. He's got a wonderful knack of stumbling into phenomenons, has Newman. "I'd just quit my job," Newman recalls of his life pre-Garry's Mod, before quickly correcting himself. "No, I got fired from my job. I was working on a dating website as a programmer, and I got fired as I set up my own rival site, which is fair enough. I'd have fired me as well. I weren't that bothered anyway as I was making more money from my own site, so I was basically doing that and working on a game called Facewound."
It seems he's always had a way with names. Facewound was a simple 2D side-scrolling shooter ("It was fun, but there weren't much to it"), and while it never saw release it provided invaluable coding experience. "I made the engine from scratch, and it's experience you can't really buy." It was enough to give him the courage to tinker with Valve's Source engine, which had just launched alongside Half-Life 2. When he finally had something to show for his work, late in 2004, the response was overwhelming.
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