Gearbox Software LLC

While modeling guns for Counter-Strike, a Gearbox artist carried an Airsoft rifle into the elevator of the building housing the development studio. An employee of one of the other businesses (a bank) saw the gun under his coat, believed it to be real, and called the police. It wasn't until the SWAT team was called in and began a floor-to-floor search for the "terrorist" that the mistake was realized. They are more careful now...

Gearbox employees have worked on 8 of the 10 most successful FPS franchises ever developed (Doom, Quake, Halo, Half-Life, Unreal, Counter-Strike, Duke Nukem, and James Bond - but not Battlefield or Rainbow Six).

Gearbox is one of the few independent developers with their own motion capture studio in-house.

Contributed by Simon Hurley.