Why Our CTO Co-Founded Godot Engine

Godot Engine’s co-creator and anitya CTO, Ariel Manzur, helped shape a philosophy of open creation that now drives anitya’s mission to make immersive experiences accessible to everyone.

Godot Engine has quietly become one of the three pillars of modern game development, powering everything from indie experiments to commercially successful titles. What connects less often is that its co-creator, Ariel Manzur, is also our CTO here at anitya.

The story of why he built one of the world's most popular open-source game engines reveals a philosophy that directly informs what we're building today. At its core, it's about enabling human connection through creation.

The Multi-Platform Turning Point

Argentina, 2007. Ariel's team was building Atmosphir, a voxel-based world editor that predated Minecraft. When Sony representatives visited with PS2 and PSP dev kits, and the first iPhone had just launched, Ariel recognized something fundamental was shifting.

The gaming landscape was fracturing. "Cross-platform" no longer meant just Windows, Mac, and Linux. Mobile devices were becoming real computers, consoles had wildly different architectures, and desktop CPUs were moving from single-core to multi-core designs.

"We saw the architecture and we said we have to switch a lot of very fundamental things in the engine," Ariel recalls.

The problem was architectural. Their existing engine was built for a world of single-core processors and predictable desktop platforms. But the PS3's Cell processor demanded distributed computing across multiple cores. The iPhone and PSP proved that mobile wasn't just a different form factor, it was a fundamentally different computing paradigm. The old approach of building for one platform and porting later wouldn't scale.

They needed an engine designed from the ground up for portability and parallel processing. Not just an engine that could export to multiple platforms, but one whose core architecture assumed heterogeneous hardware and multiple execution contexts. So they started over.

But here's what makes this story unusual: they didn't build Godot to commercialize it or fill a market gap. They built it because Ariel was genuinely curious about what would happen when you removed barriers between creators and their audiences.

For Ariel, games aren't just software, they're a medium of expression. "It's a way of reaching out to other humans," he says. And if games are fundamentally about human connection, then the tools to make them should be accessible to anyone with something to say.

He'd watched Linux completely transform the server industry. Every major tech company deploys on open-source infrastructure now. Nobody writes proprietary kernels for enterprise systems anymore.

"We saw what happened with Linux in the enterprise server industry," Ariel explains. "At first it was seen as a competitor, and now it's completely taken over. We kept asking ourselves: why isn't this happening in game development, an industry we knew so well?"

With the team's belief aligned in the path to open-source, they built Godot internally for over five years before releasing it publicly. The vision was simple: give creators the tools to reach people across any platform, without gatekeepers or barriers.

Building in the Open 

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The development process itself reflected this experimental mindset. Take the animation system as an example. What started as a simple problem (adding footstep sounds to a character) became an opportunity to rethink how animations work.

A producer mentioned a clever trick from the Torque Engine: use an invisible object in the walking animation that moves up and down. When it crosses below the floor level, trigger the sound.

"I thought that's a very interesting idea," Ariel remembers. "What if we put an extra channel with information that's not visual? Maybe sounds, or anything else."

He generalized the concept in a couple of hours. Instead of animations just being bone positions and rotations, they could carry any kind of data. Events, triggers, whatever developers needed. It's this kind of lateral thinking, finding ways to give creators more expressive power, that shaped Godot's development.

For years, Godot grew steadily within certain developer circles. Then COVID hit. By the time Ariel attended his first post-pandemic convention in 2023, recognition had exploded. "That was a huge difference in people recognizing the engine," he says.

Now Godot games on Steam are doubling year over year. At the 2024 GMTK Game Jam, 37% of submissions used Godot. The watershed moment came at an airport when an immigration officer recognized the engine and mentioned they used it. No tech conference, no planned meeting, just organic adoption reaching critical mass.

Today, Godot powers viral arena shooters, psychedelic immersive sims, and monster-collecting RPGs that rival major franchises. Games like Brotato have generated over $10 million. Dome Keeper sold over a million copies. These successes prove that Godot competes commercially with proprietary engines while remaining completely free and open-source.

More importantly, each of these games represents someone's vision reaching players they might never have reached otherwise. A solo developer's weird idea finding its audience. A small team's creative risk paying off. That's what removing barriers enables.

Building the Next Layer

Godot democratized game development by removing barriers to cross-platform creation. anitya is applying that same approach to immersive experiences. AR, VR, and spatial computing face the same accessibility challenges gaming had before Godot. Complex tools, fragmented platforms, steep learning curves, and gatekeepers extracting value at every turn.

But underneath the technical parallels is something deeper. Games are one way people reach out to each other, share experiences, create emotional connections. Immersive experiences are another. The medium changes, but the fundamental human need remains the same.

Ariel brings that same philosophy to anitya: 

That's what Godot proved: when you remove barriers and trust creators with powerful tools, unexpected and beautiful connections emerge. Not just commercial success, but genuine human expression finding its audience.

Now we're applying that same conviction to the immersive web. Different technology, same belief in human creativity and connection. And once again, Ariel's curious to see what happens when we hand people the tools and get out of the way.

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