The Gambit Project was founded in the mid-1980s by Richard McKelvey at the California Institute of Technology. The original implementation was written in BASIC, with a simple graphical interface. This code was ported to C around 1990 with the help of Bruce Bell, and was distributed publicly as version 0.13 in 1991 and 1992.
A major step in the evolution of Gambit took place with the awarding of the NSF grants in 1994, with McKelvey and Andrew McLennan as principal investigators, and Theodore Turocy as the head programmer. The grants sponsored a complete rewrite of Gambit in C++. The graphical interface was made portable across platforms through the use of the wxWidgets library (http://www.wxwidgets.org). Version 0.94 of Gambit was released in the late summer of 1994, version 0.96 followed in 1999, and version 0.97 in 2002. During this time, many students at Caltech and Minnesota contributed to the effort by programming, testing, and/or documenting. These include, alphabetically, Bruce Bell, Anand Chelian, Matthew Derer, Nelson Escobar, Ben Freeman, Eugene Grayver, Todd Kaplan, Geoff Matters, Brian Trotter, Michael Vanier, Roberto Weber, and Gary Wu.
Over the same period, Bernhard von Stengel, of the London School of Economics, made significant contributions in the implementation of the sequence form methods for two-player extensive games, and for contributing his "clique" code for identification of equilibrium components in two-player strategic games, as well as other advice regarding Gambit's implementation and architecture.
The present series of Gambit releases, numbered 0.2005.mm.dd according to release date, focuses on two objectives. First, the graphical interface was reimplemented and modernized, with the goal of following good interaction design principles, especially in regards to easing the learning curve for users new to Gambit and new to game theory. Second, the internal architecture of Gambit was refactored to increase interoperability between the tools provided by Gambit and those written independently. In particular, there are many more researchers active in computation in game theory in 2005 then during the last major Gambit development phase circa 1995, and the architecture of Gambit is evolving to reflect this.