"The Torque Game Engine was initally created by Garage Games to power their Tribes and Tribes 2 PC-only first person shooters, and was later developped into a fully-functioning, multi-platform game development too."

Although many of those behind Tribes 2 are now involved with GarageGames, it was Dynamix, a division of Sierra which originally created the engine and Tribes/Tribes 2. GarageGames was subsequently setup by people from Dynamix. The new company were able to come to an arrangement with Sierra to develop what is now known as the Torque engine (with a lot of ripping out of Tribes2 content so as to not infringe upon IP).

Of course, I guess this doesn't bother gamers too much, just as long as we get great cross-platform games based on the engine... which thankfully, we are :)