The first versions of OcempGUI were created in 2004, when the author of the package started the Ocean Empire project. Ocean Empire is a reimplementation of an old MS-DOS™ game named Ocean Trader.

The author decided to use the pygame library, which is a python wrapper of the SDL library and noted later, that no matching GUI like extensions exist for it. The first task was to implement such a GUI extension to have a suitable graphical environment for the game. The result of this attempt is OcempGUI.

OcempGUI itself is a GUI toolkit based on the Sprite concept of pygame and completely implemented in Python. It can be easily integrated in projects and reduces the development time by providing an own event mangement system and a reliable collection of user interface elements, of which all components are easy to use, extensible and support styling for the look and feel.