Garry Newman interview: s&box is finally here as a successor to Garry's Mod
A whole new sandbox for past, present, and future
Garry Newman and his team at Facepunch Studios have been working on a successor to Garry's Mod, called s&box, which launched today (April 28). Available for $19.99/£16.75, it's powered by the Source 2 engine, letting players create games and distribute them via Steam, thanks to a deal agreed between Valve and Facepunch.
However, the name may sound familiar to some. Garry's Mod is one of the first modifications I ever played in the early 2000s. Released in December 2004, it took advantage of Valve's Source engine, which powers Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and more. I remember playing Newman's toolbox mod so much back then - a group of us would join random servers and, to my regret, often destroy user-made bridges and more.
Garry's Mod is still going strong today, but s&box represents where Newman wants to take the idea - to give players the opportunity of a career and a paycheck. To mark s&box's release, I spoke to Newman all about it and where it can go.
Opening up the s&box
s&box has been in development for about six years - how does it feel now that it’s out? Or does it feel like the actual beginning of things?
Garry Newman: There are always mixed feelings when releasing something. It's nice to work on something in relative secrecy, quietly, no rush or deadlines. But that comes with the feeling that you might be totally wasting your time. That you're doing all this work that no one will care about and will go straight in the bin.
So it's been nice to take the wrapping off and show people and have people see it and understand it. It's nice to get into the groove of improving and iterating, releasing weekly patches to everyone. That's where we always want to be, really.
Now that more people are using s&box, what’s something they’re doing that you didn’t really expect?
There are a million things. It's what I love about working on this stuff. It's why I loved making Garry's Mod, and it's why I loved making Rust. We're magicians trying to impress each other with new tricks. The community is always going to be more powerful and more industrious than us. Seeing the absolute volume and variety of things they create is what impresses me, not one thing in particular. To have people take what you've made and make 50,000 new things with it - that's what gets me out of bed every day.
The agreement with Valve to release games made in s&box is huge - was this always an aim for you and the team to give players this opportunity?
Yeah. The problem with Garry's Mod was that it was a dead end for developers. If I were a developer now, I wouldn't learn or create any code for Garry's Mod, because the skills aren't transferable and there's no exit plan. If you make the most popular game in Garry's Mod, you are going to end up remaking it in Unity and trying to sell it on Steam.
That's what I had noticed. That's the problem we're trying to solve here. We should be making an environment where people can invest their time, and it can lead to something else. Whether they're making money through our Play Fund or whether they decide to export their game and put it on Steam as a real standalone game. There should be options.
I’ve been reading your blog for years - did s&box ever have an ‘in the shit’ moment, and if so, what got it out of the hole?
Oh plenty. That's pretty much what programming is. We moved engines three times. We rewrote systems dozens of times. Development is constantly getting yourself in the shit and climbing out.
Do you see Facepunch potentially releasing its next game via s&box someday?
That would be the absolute dream. When I was coming up, each company had its own game engine, which gave its games a unique feel and abilities. Now everything is made in Unity or Unreal, I think we lost that a bit. We're selling our soul to these engine companies, we're at their will, we're building our houses on sand. I dream that we end up with an engine that could rival Unity or Unreal in terms of ease of use, polish, and feature set.
Looking ahead to its roadmap, Controller UI and Editor improvements are being laid out, which sounds like s&box could be perfect for handheld devices powered by SteamOS. Do you see a future where people are making games on the Steam Deck and others via s&box?
I'd love to get to a point where people think of this as the Steam Engine. We have been on Steam since it began. I had the Steam SDK before Steam existed. Of all the people in the world, Facepunch is best positioned to integrate a game engine properly with Steam. So yeah, we'd love to be fully integrated and compatible with all of Valve's hardware. We'd love to be the best choice for all of that. That's definitely our intention.
My thanks to Garry for taking the time to chat with me.
Considering the huge potential that s&box clearly offers to players, I'm surprised by how little fanfare it's gotten. The amount that you can do with this toolbox, combined with the ability to release what you've made on Steam with little difficulty, makes me think that s&box is going to explode without many realising it. Many games are already available to play within the toolbox, such as Marble Racer and Triggernometry, meaning anyone buying s&box from today will have plenty of titles to try out.
But it's also launching at a time when players have access to other sandbox games like Minecraft, Fortnite Creative, and Dreams. Users are so ingrained in these ecosystems that it may be difficult for something new to appeal to them. However, s&box feels like it could break through the barrier by offering players a way to earn from what they've created and release it directly through Steam. With the recent announcement of the Steam Controller, it feels like s&box could be the killer game creation platform alongside the peripheral once it launches on May 4, strengthened even more once Valve's Steam Machine and Steam Frame products arrive later this year.
It's essentially what Garry's Mod could have been, but it was a different era twenty years ago. Newman's comment about how s&box could rival others like Unity and Unreal doesn't seem like a massive stretch when you consider how much it offers for users. For $19.99/£16.75, it's a fair price to pay to see what the next step of Garry's Mod is capable of in 2026 and beyond.
