The game revolves around the owner of a financially stricken demolition company, who is caught undertaking a questionable job and becomes entangled between helping police investigations and taking on further dubious assignments.

While working closely with the former Mediocre designer Emil Bengtsson, Gustafsson regularly shared development updates via Twitter and the resulting popularity led him to not pursue traditional marketing for Teardown.

Teardown had sold 1.1 million copies by August 2022, and the game's success led to Tuxedo Labs being acquired by Saber Interactive under Embracer Group.

PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S ports, published by Saber Interactive, were released in November 2023, upping the player count to 2.5 million.

On the day after the demolition, the owner's mother, Tracy, alerts them to the fact that the razed building was under cultural heritage protection and that a traffic camera had caught the company vehicle entering the site.

Through Woo, Amanatides learns of the owner's services and hires them to increase BlueTide's security by obtaining confidential information on autonomous guard robots.

Shipping logs from the Evertides Mall lead the owner to the Muratori Islands, where Terdiman orders them to secure evidence and destroy the local supply chain.

Tracy is unaware of her fate as she is trying out her new tanning bed, so the owner arrives in Cullington and safely guides the Truxterminator through the town and into the sea.

Teardown was developed by Tuxedo Labs, an indie game studio founded by the Swedish programmer Dennis Gustafsson.

[17] Together with Henrik Johansson, he founded the mobile game studio Mediocre in 2010, where they worked on Smash Hit, PinOut, and the Sprinkle series.

[42][43][44] After shutting down Mediocre in 2017, Gustafsson began working on technology for destructible environments using voxels, an idea he had been looking to pursue for some time.

[42] Destructible voxels appeared easier to implement because regular polygons would have led to arbitrary geometry with overly complex collision detection.

[42] After creating a voxel sandbox, Gustafsson worked alongside former Mediocre designer Emil Bengtsson to come up with gameplay concepts.

[17][43] The developers explored a survival game prototype featuring giant spiders but were generally not content with the use of enemies, which would disrupt the destructive gameplay.

[17][49] Lastly, they toyed with a heist concept, requiring the player to steal a predefined set of objects but considered this task too trivial and regarded using limited tools and caches as too restrictive.

[15][17] The initial levels Gustafsson designed with this concept in mind were long, straight corridors that the player would have travelled twice, reaching an item and returning to the getaway vehicle.

After Bengtsson re-joined the project, the two discovered that the game played much better when it featured multiple objectives in a non-linear open world, which became the final design.

[15] He once looked into procedurally altering levels between sessions to reflect damage the player had inflicted earlier but scrapped the idea due to time.

[47]: 30:37  Adding multiplayer was not planned, as the engine was written for single-player gameplay, and the team considered the networked synchronisation of all voxel physics technically infeasible.

[47]: 16:24 Douglas Holmquist, who had worked on many of Mediocre's games, created Teardown's music and sound design, starting part-time in November 2019 before joining full-time in February 2020.

[70] The early access phase was to last approximately one year, subject to change depending on player feedback, to allow for the addition of more content.

[75] The trailer announcing the release date, published earlier that month, highlighted the updates made during the early access phase.

Saber Interactive justified its purchase by arguing that Teardown's technology could be expanded into a larger platform and compete with Minecraft and Roblox.

[83] Time Campers was released alongside the console ports, while the pre-order-exclusive Löckelle Motor Park content pack became free DLC in December 2023.

[5] Smith regarded the game as rarely frustrating due to its use of quick saves, which Andy Kelly of PC Gamer echoed.

[88] PC Gamer's Natalie Clayton praised Teardown's ray-traced lighting implementation and overall art style as "something utterly gorgeous".

[89] With only Part 1 released at the time, Just felt that the game lacked varying content, making it feel "lifeless and dull" after an initial "wow effect".

[14] The PlayStation 5 version was applauded for its performance by Push Square's Christian Kobza, Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia, and Multiplayer.it's Francesco Serino.

[95] Barbosa criticised the pace of upgrades in the campaign, feeling that it hindered the "ability to tear maps apart in entertaining ways" and prevented drastic changes in mission objectives.

[18] In contrast, Jason Coles of NME found satisfaction in discovering new shortcuts on previously played levels after unlocking the planks.