Very similar to gvgai, Julian Togelius actually called them out on that: DeepMind Lab2D vs gvgai.
TODO get running, publish demo videos on YouTube.
Figure 1. Source.
At twitter.com/togelius/status/1328404390114435072 called out on DeepMind Lab2D for not giving them credit on prior work!
This very much looks like like GVGAI which was first released in 2014, been used in dozens (maybe hundreds) of papers, and for which one of the original developers was Tom Schaul at DeepMind...
As seen from web.archive.org/web/20220331022932/http://gvgai.net/ though, DeepMind sponsored them at some point.