Helium was born directly out of Insomniac Games' Nocturnal Initiative. Nocturnal Initiative was created by Geoff Evans, Andy Burke, and Mike Acton as a way of sharing proven game development techniques with the community through the sharing of source code and production proven game development techniques. It was announced at GDC San Francisco 2008. All source code shared via Nocturnal was production-tested libraries (and a couple of utilities that support the libraries).
After leaving Insomniac, Geoff Evans, Andy Burke, Rachel Mark, and Paul Haile continued to hack on code previously released through Nocturnal Initiative. Shortly after departing Insomniac, the team joined WhiteMoon Dreams, Inc.
WhiteMoon Dreams had been working on their own next-generation internal game engine, Lunar. Lunar was principally written by Ted Cipicchio, a former lead engineer form Liquid Entertainment. Lunar focused primarly on fundamental platform abstractions, asset tree, content processing via the FBX SDK, entity system, job management, and included a well engineered platform-abstraction for graphics (which included a Direct3D 9 implementation). Shortly after joining WhiteMoon it became clear that the tools from Nocturnal would mesh well with Lunar, and thus the Helium Project was born.
WhiteMoon Dreams' generous support of Lunar necessitated a new name for its independent development of the technology. Helium, as a project distinct from both Nocturnal and Lunar, was born. Over the summer and fall of 2010 Helium was refactored and improved to include better support for unicode, improved UI components in the Editor, and better cross-platform support. Soon thereafter WhiteMoon hit some turbulence in its goals as a company and most of the team moved on to other opportunties.