Unity began as a failed game called GooBall. Three young developers in Copenhagen made it for the Mac in 2005, and almost nobody bought it. The tools they built to make it were the real product. Unity turned them into an engine any developer could afford. By the time it filed to go public in 2020, Unity powered a large share of the world's mobile games, from tiny indie projects to hits.

GooBall's Lucky Failure

David Helgason, Joachim Ante, and Nicholas Francis founded the company in Copenhagen in 2004. They called it Over the Edge. GooBall flopped, but the three saw value in their tools. They renamed the company Unity Technologies in 2007. The bet was that game making should not need a big studio's budget. Unity offered a cheap or free engine and earned money as its users grew.

A Week of Big IPOs

Unity priced its offering at $52 a share on September 17, 2020, above its range, and raised about $1.3 billion. The stock closed its first day on the New York Stock Exchange at $68.35, up 31 percent. In 2022 it merged with ironSource, an ad tech company. In 2023 a new per-install fee angered developers, and chief executive John Riccitiello stepped down. Unity still trades on the NYSE as U.

Cover: Puppeteer, Okumura Toshinobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a puppeteer (the engine behind the game).