12 Facts About SpaceChem

SpaceChem is an indie puzzle game developed by Zachtronics Industries, based on principles of automation and chemical bonding.

SpaceChem was the developer's first foray into a commercial title after a number of free Flash-based browser games that feature similar puzzle-based assembly problems.

SpaceChem was incorporated into some academic institutions for teaching concepts related to both chemistry and programming.

SpaceChem took about a year with a team of seven people from around the globe to create: Barth was responsible for design and production, Collin Arnold and Keith Holman handled the programming, Ryan Sumo created the visuals, Evan Le Ny the music, Ken Bowen the sound and Hillary Field created the game's narrative.

SpaceChem devised the means of sharing solutions through YouTube videos due to similar comments and discussions on the previous games.

Related searches

SpaceChem tried too much to incorporate a theme based on scientific research, popularized at the time by the success of Portal.

SpaceChem instead found potential players were scared off by the chemistry aspect even though the game had little connection to real chemistry; a colleague had once suggested to Barth that if the game was named SpaceGems and modeled around alchemy, the game would have sold twice as many copies.

SpaceChem received a free update in late April 2011, which added several new features to the game as well as new puzzles.

SpaceChem was ported to the iPad in October 2011, using touch controls instead of mouse and keyboard to manipulate the visual program.

The success of SpaceChem led to several companies contacting Zachtronics to develop educational titles; the company spent about two years working with Amplify to develop three "edutainment" games for their platform before they returned to work on more direct entertainment titles, but used the opportunity to improve on their in-game teaching mechanics.

SpaceChem was generally well received by critics, with an aggregate Metacritic score of 84 out of 100 from its Microsoft Windows release.

Barth stated that with sales of SpaceChem, he was able to quit his job at Microsoft and run his development company full-time.