Indie Built, Inc.

The company was founded in 1983 by Bruce Carver (President) and Chris Jones (CFO) as Access Software Inc. Their company grew quickly with the success of such early titles as Beachhead and their first golf game, World Class Leader Board. In 1989, Access Software began their best-known contributions to computer gaming, with the release of Mean Streets. Although the game was initially intended to be only a flight simulator, its developers added a framing story featuring a futuristic detective named Tex Murphy.

A sequel to Mean Streets (minus the flight simulator) was released in 1991, and Martian Memorandum went on to win the Software Publishers Association (SPA) Adventure Game of the Year award. Three years later, Under a Killing Moon became one of the first major CD-ROM games and was named Adventure Game of the Year by numerous magazines and organizations, including the SPA. A fourth Tex Murphy game, The Pandora Directive, earned yet another Adventure Game of the Year award in 1996. The final (to date) chapter of the Tex Murphy series was 1997's Overseer, and was one of the first games ever designed specifically for DVD.

Access Software was most widely identified with the Links series, which teed off in 1990 with the release of Links: The Challenge of Golf. This groundbreaking, wildly popular product revolutionized computer golf games, spawned a series of brilliant iterations, and is still going strong today. Access and Microsoft first linked up in 1992 with the release of Microsoft Golf, based on the original version of Links. Later collaborations included Links for Windows, which utilized the Links 386 game engine. On 20 April 1998, Access was acquired by Microsoft and became known as Indie Built. They participated in the launch of Xbox on the holidays of 2001 with Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding.

In October 2004, Indie Built, Inc. became a wholly owned subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO) as part of the 2K Games brand, focusing on sports titles for the next generation of gaming consoles and the PC platform. Indie Built was a part of the 2K Sports label, together with Kush Games and Visual Concepts Entertainment.

In April, 2006, Take-Two shut down Indie Built, Inc. Many members of the studio joined the newly formed Big Finish Games and its sister studio TruGolf, which occupy the same building.