GameBots project was started by Andrew N. Marshal and Gal Kaminka at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. Their GameBots used older version of the game – Unreal Tournament (2000). The goal was to enable the use of the environment of the game Unreal Tournament for research in artificial intelligence.

GameBots project was continued by Joe Manojlovich, Tim Garwood and Jessica Bayliss from RIT university. They ported GameBots project to newer version of the game Unreal Tournament – Unreal Tournament 2004.

In the meantime, Pogamut GameBots branch firstly emerged debugging the old Marshal, Kaminka GameBots version. Later, Pogamut GameBots were ported to Unreal Tournament 2004 as well. Pogamut GameBots went through major code refactorization and debugging, adding new features, correcting bugs and extending the text protocol. As far as we know Pogamut GameBots branch is the only one still developed at the time of writing.