The story
Atomic Sock Monkey Press was founded by Chad Underkoffler with its first game, Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot (2003), released digitally in December 2003. Shannon Appelcline, author of Designers & Dragons (2014), highlighted Underkoffler had been designing a game about sky pirates as his first independent role-playing game for Atomic Sock Monkey, but put that game aside to develop Dead Inside (2004) instead. In 2001, "Phil Reed of Ronin Arts approached Underkoffler about creating a new RPG" which led to the creation of Dead Inside and "as late as 2003, Dead Inside was still bandied around as an upcoming publication for Ronin Arts". However, similarities between Dead Inside and Ronin Arts' The Whispering Vault along with "some thematic disagreements between Reed and Underkoffler regarding Dead Inside" resulted in Underkoffler bringing the game to Atomic Sock Monkey for publication. Appelcline commented "as is often the case in the history of small companies, this singular event would set Atomic Sock Monkey on a trajectory that would define its publications for the next few years". This led to the development of the PDQ system – "by the end of 2006," the company had released "four different games using the PDQ house system" and had licensed the system to other publishers.
Appelcline noted that by late 2007, Underkoffler had realized he did not enjoy the business aspect of the company and came to an agreement with Evil Hat Productions which made "Atomic Sock Monkey into a sort of imprint of Evil Hat: Underkoffler would pitch them an idea, and if they liked it, he'd create a game for them to publish". Due to this arrangement, Underkoffler was finally able to publish his sky pirate game as Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies in 2009.
From Wikipedia’s article on Atomic Sock Monkey Press, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3