"Hurgle Studios" was conceived originally in 2001 by J Artis, who had always wanted to "make games". This passion led him to learn Flash and ActionScript, and he began creating small games hosted on a domain with that name. After fighting several years with the process of solo basement development, he recruited his lifelong friend Uberfuzzy to help with the website and server side of things, as well as serving as both a voice of reason and an incredibly thorough tester. The two worked together in a very informal setting, and produced a handful of further titles that are current hidden away.
The hassle of day-to-day life forced both of these hoodlums into the world of legitimate employment, and the game studio took a bit of a back seat. Fortunately, J ended up working with Matt Kilgore who shared a growing interest in game development, and impressive technical skills. After some discussion, the three formalized the organization of Hurgle Studios LLC, releasing their first commercial title ("Can Do") in 2024.
J Artis is a software developer and game designer, among many other hobbies. He has been making games for approximately forever, and has experience in a variety of programming languages. He is the founder of Hurgle Studios and the self-proclaimed "lead developer" of all games and apps produced by the studio.
Christopher Stafford is a software developer and system administrator, with a focus on web technologies. He has been making websites and web applications for over 20 years, and has experience with a wide variety of programming languages and platforms. He also has a gigantic and majestic spoon.
Matt Kilgore is a software developer of 10 to 15 years. His main passion is low level development and pretending to be a hardware developer, but occasionally he climbs from the depths and pretends to understand CSS. His favorite language is C and his happy place is a bash shell with a well configured Vim. It's questionable how applicable skills are to game development, but J is unconcerned.
Jacob Barton is a developer with a love for games, systems, and mechanics. He made a game one time that impressed J enough to let him join the group. Now he lives in the backlog as a dwarven miner. Picking away in the ticket mines. Most say this sounds like torture; but he says he wouldn't want it any other way.
Man, I'm just going to lay it out straight here. None of us really want to work a day job, I am pretty sure we'd rather be doing this full time. With that in mind, we are going to continue making games (because one or more of us are compulsively driven to do so) and hopefully find unobtrusive and inoffensive ways to monetize them a little bit.
To clarify, the focus will always remain on the games. The dollars will hopefully follow.
True story: J had the original vision of "Hurgle" as a social media aggregation site, after being tired of having to use so many to keep up with all of his friends. The name was picked as a nonsense word that also sounded like a verb in English, and the domain was available. It's been through multiple iterations over time, but the name has stuck around.