Linux Game Publishing

Linux Game Publishing, also known as LGP, was a British software company founded in Nottingham, England, on October 15, 2001, that ported, published, and sold video games running on Linux operating systems. Founded by Michael Simms in the immediate aftermath of Loki Software’s bankruptcy, LGP filled the gap Loki left in the Linux gaming market and became the primary commercial destination for Linux game ports through most of the 2000s. The company went defunct in 2011 with its last major release dating to 2009.

Founding and the Loki Software Legacy

Loki Software was the dominant Linux game porter of the late 1990s, responsible for bringing a substantial catalog of commercial games to the platform before filing for bankruptcy in January 2001. Michael Simms founded Linux Game Publishing in October 2001 specifically to continue the work Loki had started, positioning LGP as both a porting house and a publisher for developers who needed Linux distribution support. Frank C. Earl served as a senior developer across the studio’s active years. In addition to game porting and publishing, LGP sponsored the development of Grapple, a free software network library designed specifically for games, reflecting a broader commitment to Linux gaming infrastructure rather than commercial output alone.

The LGP Catalog

LGP’s active catalog covered fifteen supported titles across simulation, puzzle, first-person shooter, and tactical role-playing genres. The studio ported Cold War and Postal 2 directly, with Postal 2’s port handled by Ryan C. Gordon, a former Loki employee who became one of the most prominent individual game porters in the Linux ecosystem. Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds Survivor, developed by IGIOS, were published by LGP with the studio handling Linux distribution. Gorky 17 came to Linux through a porting effort by Hyperion Entertainment published by LGP. Additional titles included Jets’n’Guns from RakeInGrass, the X2: The Threat and X3: Reunion science fiction games from Egosoft, and Software Tycoon from RuneSoft. Shadowgrounds: Survivor in 2009 was the studio’s last major commercial release.

Decline and Closure

LGP’s later years were complicated by a copy protection system that relied on the company’s own servers for authentication, a dependency that created problems as the studio’s server infrastructure became unstable. In 2010 the company’s primary server went down for over two months following a hardware failure. The company’s last patch release was for Cold War in 2012. Linux Game Publishing was formally dissolved on May 3, 2011, though some web presence was maintained afterward. By the mid-2010s the Linux game market had shifted toward developers handling ports in-house and through platforms like Steam’s native Linux support, making the role LGP had filled largely obsolete.