Evan Greenwood

Evan Greenwood is a South African video game programmer and creative director best known as the founder of Free Lives, the independent Cape Town studio behind Broforce, Gorn, Terra Nil and Anger Foot.

Greenwood founded Free Lives in April 2012, when the team entered Rambros, a pixel-art 2D shooter inspired by 1980s and 1990s action films, into the Ludum Dare game jam. The jam entry was praised for its graphics and humour, so the team kept building it. Renamed Broforce, it was given away on the studio's website, came to Steam through Greenlight in 2013, spun off the free promotional game The Expendabros in 2014, and launched in full in 2015 after a team member met publisher Devolver Digital at the A MAZE festival in Berlin. Greenwood told MyGaming that Broforce had earned the studio about $3 million by 2016, and the whole team spent three months working from Mauritius on the proceeds.

Free Lives has worked out of a property in Cape Town that is part studio and part house, where some staff have lived on site. Its games mostly sell outside Africa, to players in the United States, Europe, South America and China, and most are published by Devolver Digital. After Broforce came the comedy party game Genital Jousting, the physics-driven VR gladiator game Gorn in 2019, Cricket Through the Ages for Apple Arcade, and the reverse city-builder Terra Nil in 2023, an existing project that Free Lives took on and expanded. It also developed the first-person kicking shooter Anger Foot and Stick it to the Stickman in 2024, and Gorn 2 in 2025.

The studio has started publishing as well. In September 2026 it released Dressmaker, made by Cozy Lives, a small team inside Free Lives created for gentler games than its action titles. Greenwood gave a TEDxJohannesburg talk about how a silly jam game became something bigger.

Greenwood matters because Free Lives, often called South Africa's most successful independent game studio, is proof that a self-funded team far from the big game hubs can ship hit after hit to a global audience.