The company, founded in 1999 as Linden Research, employs numerous established high-tech veterans, including former executives from Electronic Arts; eBay; Disney; Adobe Systems; and Apple.

Although Linden Lab's Second Life platform was not the first online virtual world, it has gained a large amount of attention due to its expanding user base and unique policy that allows participants to own the intellectual property rights to the in-world content they create.

[5] Rosedale's strong coding skills eventually resulted in the creation of a video compression technology that would later be acquired by RealNetworks, where he was made CTO at the age of 27.

While at RealNetworks, Rosedale's ambition to create a virtual world was resurrected and recharged by technological advances in computing and his attendance at the popular music and arts festival Burning Man.

[6] That vision soon morphed into the software-based application Linden World, where computer users could participate in task-based games and socialization in a 3D online environment.

[9] Rod Humble, appointed CEO in December 2010, announced his departure on Facebook on 24 January 2014, stating that he would be leaving Linden Lab to pursue founding a new company that will "make art, entertainment and unusual things!".

While the purchase is yet to be announced officially, activity on the games long inactive social media, Steam and Apple App Store pages point all but confirm the acquisition.

[12] Linden Lab utilized another internal tool, the Distributor, that enabled all employees to distribute "points" to projects that they deemed worthy of development and resource support.