Vendetta Online's development team is relatively small compared to many other titles in the same genre, at its largest including four people. The four original developers are John Bergman, Ray Ratelis, Andy Sloane, and Waylon Brinck. John Bergman remains the managing director and has invested much of his own personal finances into the project. The game is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and has been in development since 1998. In April 2002, the game opened with a public alpha test to prove the efficiency of the twitch style combat in the low bandwidth environment of that era. In November 2004, the game launched as a retail product, with the Linux mascot featured as part of the game box artwork. The retail-CD included Mac, Linux, and PC native versions of the game.