Austin-based Gendai Games added $1M in funding from a variety of sources, including DFJ Mercury. The company makes an interesting cross-platform game development tool named Game Salad, and the iTunes app store contains many games built with their tool. Gendai has been around for a while, launching their beta back in March of 2009. In August of that year they were selected to be part of the Austin Technology Incubator. I chose them to be presenters at the Innotech Beta Summit in October of 2009, and they made a great impression on the crowd. This summer, the company is participating in another incubator program in Los Angeles, California.

This round of funding had participation from a long list of investors including DFJ Mercury, Steamboat Ventures, ff Asset Management, and individuals Paul Bricault (on the board of William Morris), Paige Craig (investor in Plancast), Tom McInerney (advisor at Mochi Media), Josh Resnick (partner at Jericho Capital) and Mark Suster. That is a lot of names for this amount of money, and DFJ Mercury continues its trend to become the most prolific early stage investor in Austin, Texas.

“Gendai Games provides a paradigm shift in casual game development,” said Blair Garrou, managing director, DFJ Mercury. “Our firm is attracted to the simplicity and elegance of the GameSalad toolset, and is impressed by the company’s traction to date.”

The launch of GameSalad — a powerful, accessible, and amazingly fast game creation toolset that publishes to the iPhone and iPad App Store — has quickly established Gendai Games as a unique and leading gaming company. GameSalad has been downloaded more than 70,000 times and in the nine months since the launch of its iPhone publishing service, GameSalad has powered over 800 titles in the iTunes App Store.  GameSalad has been used to consistently deliver top-100 ranked games such as Asplosion! HD and Doodle Cannon to the mobile marketplace. Many of these games have been taken rapidly to market, such as the iTunes-featured game Stunt Squirrels!, which was created and published in two weeks by only one designer at Fire Maple Games.

“Brands are continually looking to extend their customer experience into games and other forms of interactive media,” said Beau Laskey, managing director of Steamboat Ventures. “We believe Gendai Games provides a compelling option for creative professionals and developers to dramatically accelerate and simplify the development of sophisticated casual games, which helps to reduce total costs and turn-around time for development studios.”