The first version of the game was released as freeware on December 21, 2005 on Marco Incitti's Blitz Creations website.
Although other freeware games similar to Geometry Wars exist, GridWars eventually became so popular that Bizarre emailed Incitti and asked him to take the game down, citing that they were "beginning to feel the Geometry Wars clone's effects on our sales via Microsoft now and are beginning a process to begin to more robustly protect our copyright and intellectual property".
Unlike Geometry Wars which eventually plateaus in difficulty facilitating high scores in the range of hundreds of millions of points, GridWars 2 has an exponentially increasing difficulty curve.
Eventually, the enemy spawn sites become so large that they nearly envelop the entire grid.
Another important difference from Geometry Wars is the ability to "farm" black holes.