Before forming Fullbright, Steve Gaynor, Johnnemann Nordhagen, and Karla Zimonja had worked together on Minerva's Den, the single-player expansion to BioShock 2.

[2] Craig likened the group to a band due to the closeness partially necessitated by lack of money, such as in sharing flights and lodging.

[2] Steve Gaynor had attended Portland State and dabbled in several arts fields before using level design to enter the games industry.

Though the two wanted to collaborate, they were now split between Boston and San Francisco, where Zimonja continued at 2K Marin on The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

As Gaynor and Zimonja lacked programming expertise, they reached out to Nordhagen, who had recently sent an "existentially introspective" tweet about his career.

[3] The Fullbright Company partnered with indie publisher Midnight City to produce a console port of Gone Home.

Fullbright originally built the game for personal computers so as to not worry about the design limitations and optimizations necessary for a console release.

The brief trailer featured a radio dialogue between a man and a woman, set in the Lunar Transfer Station Tacoma 200,000 miles from Earth.

[11] In August 2021, Polygon reported that about fifteen employees, including ten women, had left the studio over the course of Open Roads' development due to Gaynor's behavior, particularly towards female employees, which included micromanagement, belittling treatment, and other toxic behaviors.

Having been informed beforehand of the move, planned Open Roads publisher Annapurna Interactive remained supportive of the Fullbright staff, while Gaynor apologized for his mistreatment of employees, and said that stepping back from development "has given me space and perspective to see how my role needs to change and how I need to learn and improve as part of a team, including working with an expert management consultant, and rethinking my relationship to the work at Fullbright.