Ever since it was announced, s&box has been carefully described by Facepunch studios as a “spiritual successor” to Garry’s mod (Gmod), but not an actual sequel to Gmod. “S&box isn’t Garry’s Mod 2,” says the studio. “It’s built to eclipse what was possible before—not just modernise it.”
The link can be a bit confusing. Gmod was created by Garry Newman, the founder of Facepunch Studios, and uses Half-Life 2’s assets to create a (drumroll please) sandbox environment, within which players can create games and scenarios. S&box has some of the same ideas but is its own game engine and creation platform, with much greater potential for users than Gmod.
Before the launch of s&box we’re considering changing the name. Here are our choices:January 22, 2026
The poll is now finished and the results are overwhelmingly in: Garry’s mod 2 won out with a whopping 66.6% of the vote, leaving s&box (19.2%) and poor old crapbox (11.4%) in the dust. Sparks, which I actually quite like, earned a measly 2.7%.
I can’t help but feel this result is some kind of argument against democracy, and so I asked Newman via DM if he was serious about the poll, and whether we could expect s&box to officially become Garry’s mod 2.
“People are dickheads,” said Newman. “I fucking love crapbox. I like the self-deprecation stuff, so much better than trying to be big bollocks.”
This doesn’t explicitly answer the question, though I’m gonna go out on a limb: I think it’s unlikely we’ll get an official Garry’s mod 2, not least because it’s always been a point of confusion for s&box. And let’s face it, Newman’s right. As soon as he put that option on the poll, people were going to be dickheads and vote for it just because, y’know, he’s Garry and who doesn’t love Garry’s mod?
Whatever name it ends up with, s&box is due to launch on Steam in the near future, and late last year Facepunch announced that it was also going open source. It’s on Github now and developers can basically do what they like with it. Newman said at the time of this announcement that the studio’s trying to create one of those Valve-style ecosystems that can benefit everyone:
“[Valve] did it for me,” said Newman. “They could have easily made Garry’s mod themselves. They could have taken 100% of that money. They could have given me $100k for the rights. But they didn’t, they knew that if you let people succeed it’s good for them and it’s good for you. Everybody wins.
“Valve gave me my chance. I’m already rich. I don’t want to fuck anyone over. I want to give opportunities to the next generation, like Valve did me. We can all win together.”
