Doom Eternal art director quits id Software to bootstrap indie studio Turnkey

Tony Garza and Richard O'Neal left id Software to self-fund Turnkey Games, building horror adventure Apart without a publisher or an office.

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Two id Software veterans have walked away from a major studio to build their own, funding it themselves rather than chasing a publisher first. Doom Eternal art director Tony Garza and his cousin Richard O'Neal, both id alumni, founded Dallas based Turnkey Games and are now developing a third person horror adventure called Apart, in which the player controls a severed arm and a modular zombie child navigating a post apocalyptic world.

The pair spoke to Game Developer about why they left and how they are trying to avoid the mistakes that sink so many first time studios. Garza says the decision predates the chaos that followed. Microsoft, which owns id Software as part of its Activision Blizzard-Bethesda umbrella, later confirmed plans to cut 3,200 jobs before the end of its current fiscal year, a wave that hit id itself. Garza had already left by then. As he puts it in the piece, “we felt increasingly disconnected from some of the values and decisions we were seeing around us, and the direction of the industry in general prompted us to build something on our own.”

Why bootstrapping changes the calculation

The headline decision at Turnkey was to self-fund rather than sign with a publisher early. That meant no advance to cover payroll, but also no deadline imposed by someone else's balance sheet. O'Neal tells Game Developer that “most of the money went directly into making the game, development equipment, software, contractors where we needed specialized help, business and legal expenses, and eventually marketing.” The studio has no office and, according to O'Neal, no interest in building a large team before the game can support one. “The goal has always been to put as much of the budget on the screen as possible,” he says.

That approach buys time, which the pair treat as the scarce resource. Garza describes building the team “gradually” and planning development “so we could sustain progress without taking on unnecessary risk.” It is a deliberately unglamorous strategy, closer to a small business managing cash flow than the popular image of an indie studio chasing a viral trailer.

Cutting scope without cutting ambition

The other lesson concerns honesty about what a small team can actually finish. Garza says he and O'Neal were blunt with themselves about Turnkey's limits, which meant prioritising features that mattered and being willing, in his words, to “cut or simplify ideas that didn't meaningfully improve the game.” For a studio without triple-A resources, that discipline is the difference between shipping and stalling. Neither founder frames this as a retreat from ambition, more as a redirection of it: fewer systems, but each one finished properly.

What is still unclear

Game Developer's piece does not give a release window for Apart, nor detail the size of Turnkey's current team beyond the two founders and unspecified contractors. It is also not clear how the studio is handling distribution or whether a publisher deal remains possible later in development, only that one was not sought at the outset. For now, Turnkey's story is a data point rather than a template: one small studio, formed on a hunch about where a major publisher was heading, trying to prove that leaner can still mean finished.

Sources

Image: Game Developer

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