Gaming: I Asked Garry Newman If He Really Was Going To Rename S&box As...

"People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazi party Jeremy. You can't trust people."

Ever since it was announced, s&box has been carefully described by Facepunch studios as a "spiritual successor" to Garry's mod (Gmod), but not an actual sequel to Gmod. "S&box isn’t Garry’s Mod 2," says the studio. "It’s built to eclipse what was possible before—not just modernise it."

The link can be a bit confusing. Gmod was created by Garry Newman, the founder of Facepunch Studios, and uses Half-Life 2's assets to create a (drumroll please) sandbox environment, within which players can create games and scenarios. S&box has some of the same ideas but is its own game engine and creation platform, with much greater potential for users than Gmod.

S&box is now gearing up for its full release on Steam in Q1 2026, and Newman recently took to X with a poll, saying that "before the launch of s&box we're considering changing the name." This was followed by four options: s&box, garry's mod 2, sparks and crapbox.

Before the launch of s&box we're considering changing the name. Here are our choices:January 22, 2026

The poll is now finished and the results are overwhelmingly in: Garry's mod 2 won out with a whopping 66.6% of the vote, leaving s&box (19.2%) and poor old crapbox (11.4%) in the dust. Sparks, which I actually quite like, earned a measly 2.7%.

I can't help but feel this result is some kind of argument against democracy, and so I asked Newman via DM if he was serious about the poll, and whether we could expect s&box to officially become Garry's mod 2.

"People are dickheads," said Newman. "I fucking love crapbox. I like the self-deprecation stuff, so much better than trying to be big bollocks."

This doesn't explicitly answer the question, though I'm gonna go out on a limb: I think it's unlikely we'll get an official Garry's mod 2, not least because it's always been a point of confusion for s&box. And let's face it, Newman's right. As soon as he put that option on the poll, people were going to be dickheads and vote for it just because, y'know, he's Garry and who doesn't love Garry's mod?

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Source: PC Gamer