Some of the design choices and experiences for Blender were carried over from an earlier software application, called Traces, that Roosendaal developed for NeoGeo on the Commodore Amiga platform during the 1987–1991 period.
The name Blender was inspired by a song by the Swiss electronic band Yello, from the album Baby which NeoGeo used in its showreel. The version 1.00 was released in January 1995, with the primary author being company co-owner and software developer Ton Roosendaal.
The Dutch animation studio NeoGeo (not associated with the Neo Geo video game hardware brand) started to develop Blender as an in-house application, and based on the timestamps for the first source files, Januis considered to be Blender's birthday.
