Rockstar North
Rockstar North is a British video game developer and a studio of Rockstar Games based in Edinburgh. The studio is best known for creating the Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto series, including Grand Theft Auto V, the second-best-selling game and most profitable entertainment product of all time.
David Jones founded the company as DMA Design in 1988 in his hometown of Dundee. During his studies, he had developed the game Menace and struck a six-game publishing deal with Psygnosis, which released Jones's project in October 1988. While making its sequel, Blood Money, Jones dropped out, hired several of his friends, including Mike Dailly, Steve Hammond, and Russell Kay, with whom he had attended the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club. They opened the company's first offices above a former fish and chip shop in 1989. Following the successful 1991 release of Lemmings, the studio rapidly expanded and moved into proper offices, after which Kay left to establish Visual Sciences. Several Lemmings expansions and sequels later, 1994's All New World of Lemmings was DMA Design's final game in the series and its last with Psygnosis.
After many halted projects from partnerships with Nintendo and BMG Interactive, Jones sold the financially stricken studio to Gremlin Interactive in April 1997. The subsequent spin-off of DMA Design's American satellite studio triggered Hammond's departure. While the commercially successful release of Grand Theft Auto led Take-Two Interactive to buy the game's intellectual property and form Rockstar Games in 1998, Body Harvests underperformance later that year saw Gremlin Interactive being taken over by Infogrames. In September 1999, Infogrames sold DMA Design to Take-Two, enabling a close collaboration with Rockstar Games to release Grand Theft Auto 2. Amid these changes, Dailly left for Visual Sciences, while Jones founded Denki and Real Time Worlds.
A few months after an Edinburgh branch was established for DMA Design, the prior Dundee location was closed. Grand Theft Auto III, the first Grand Theft Auto game presented fully in 3D, was released in 2001 and sold 6 million units in one year. Considered genre-defining, the game gave rise to a number of Grand Theft Auto clones. Take-Two integrated DMA Design with Rockstar Games as Rockstar Studios in March 2002, which was renamed Rockstar North in May. Since then, the studio has continued the Grand Theft Auto series with Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Grand Theft Auto V, as well as a number of smaller games in the franchise. Rockstar North also created Manhunt in 2003 and collaborated with other Rockstar Games studios on Manhunt 2, Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire, Max Payne 3, and Red Dead Redemption 2.
History
Background and formation (1983–1988)
Rockstar North was founded as DMA Design by the Dundee native David Jones. Having frequently played Space Invaders in his youth, he gained early programming knowledge when his secondary school, Linlathen High, obtained an Apple II computer and piloted O-level qualifications in computer studies. In 1983, he took up an apprenticeship at the local plant of the electronics manufacturer Timex. Although the company was best known for producing watches, the Dundee factory also built home computers for Sinclair Research, including the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, which had boosted interest in hobbyist programming in the area. Timex paid for programming courses at the local Kingsway Technical College, which also hosted the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club. Jones, the oldest attendee at the KACC, soon befriended Steve Hammond and Russell Kay. Mike Dailly, the youngest participant at 14, joined the club at the recommendation of a friend in 1984 with the Commodore Plus/4 he had received for Christmas. The quartet bonded over their shared interest in creating original games instead of playing or cloning existing ones.During their time at the KACC, Dailly and Hammond developed Freek Out for the Commodore Plus/4, which they finished and sold to the publisher Cascade for "a modest fee", while Jones and Kay cooperated on Moonshadow for the ZX Spectrum, which was eventually released as Zone Trooper. Jones and Dailly also worked on The Game With No Name. As Sinclair Research's market share dropped significantly during 1986, Timex enacted layoffs in Dundee. Jones accepted a voluntary redundancy for, a roughly half-year salary that he invested into an Amiga 1000, and subsequently enrolled in computer science at the Dundee Institute of Technology. Hammond also attended the DIT, and all four soon joined its computer club. Because Jones easily passed the course's first year, he had much time to learn to programme for the Amiga and spent one year creating the shoot 'em up CopperCon1. Working out of his parents' bedroom, he provisionally used the moniker "Acme". The game featured graphics by the demoscene member Tony Smith, with whom he communicated by post, and sounds Dailly and Hammond recorded from a Salamander machine at a local arcade.
After courting publishers at the Personal Computer World Show, Jones initially agreed to a publishing deal with Hewson Consultants but, fearing that his game would merely become the Amiga version of Zynaps, he walked away from the agreement. Instead, he turned to the nascent Psygnosis in 1987 and agreed to a six-game publishing deal. CopperCon1 was renamed Draconia, which was ultimately changed to Menace because the name was too similar to that of Draconus. Jones also agreed to bring Psygnosis's Ballistix from the Amiga to the Commodore 64, for which he engaged Dailly and Hammond. In his search for a company name to replace the already taken "Acme", Jones discussed alternatives with the members of the DIT's computer club in 1988. Among others, "Milliard", "Visual Voyage", and "Alias Smith and Jones" were floated, and Jones finally settled on "DMA Design". The abbreviation "DMA" stood for "direct memory access" in Amiga manuals but carried no meaning in the company name. While "Direct Mind Access" was official briefly, Jones eventually began stating that the abbreviation was short for "Doesn't Mean Anything". He formally founded DMA Design in 1988, when he was 22 years old.
Initial games with Psygnosis and ''Lemmings'' (1988–1994)
Menace was released in October 1988 after 18 months of development. It was DMA Design's debut game and the first game under Psygnosis's Psyclapse label for budget-priced games. Jones only received for every copy sold, which he retrospectively viewed as a "terrible" deal. Still, the 20,000 sales allowed him to buy a car and regularly visit the Psygnosis offices to meet other game developers. While working on a sequel to Menace, the difficulty of Jones's university programme spiked, leading him to drop out and pursue game development full-time, against the advice of his professors. He intended to return after one year but never finished his studies, eventually receiving an honorary degree. Jones hired Dailly, who had just been expelled from college, as the first employee in 1989. Dailly began working on a Commodore 64 conversion of Menace. Hammond joined second on a part-time basis as he continued his education, followed shortly by Kay and Brian Watson, one of Jones's university friends. The Menace sequel, Blood Money, was released in April 1989. It sold 40,000 copies. Gary Timmons joined the studio shortly after the game was completed, while Dailly developed its Commodore 64 version and began working on a PC Engine port of Shadow of the Beast for Psygnosis. DMA Design also made Shadow of the Beasts Commodore 64 port and the PC Engine and MS-DOS versions for Ballistix.Jones's father-in-law, the owner of the Dundee fish and chip shop The Deep Sea, lent him a small office space above the shop's former location at 134B Nethergate in Dundee. The infill building, built in 1893, is sometimes called the Wee Pink Nethergate House. The office was inaugurated on 1 August 1989. The studio continued to expand, also hiring many students to work part-time. In 1990, DMA Design cancelled several projects: The Golden Axe-inspired Gore! was shelved due to technical restrictions of the Amiga at the time and the platformer Cutiepoo did not make adequate progress after one year of work by the freelance programmer Tony Colgan. Jones further put aside his game Walker as he found he could not achieve his vision for it and stopped working on the Monster Cartridge, a cheat cartridge for the Amiga, after another such product was released first.
Working remotely from Edinburgh, the programmer Ian Dunlop and artist Neill Glancy began to experiment with the technology from Walker. When Dailly learned that they were working with characters just sixteen pixels tall, he challenged himself to create characters that were recognisable at half the height. During one lunch break, he animated a demo of small characters walking in a line and being killed comically, to the amusement of the office. Kay remarked that a game could be created from this. Jones concurred and thought of a design in which the player should prevent the characters from being killed. Kay wrote a demo before it was passed on to Dailly and later to Jones, who worked out the gameplay foundations with Timmons. The game was named Lemmings upon Kay's suggestion and released in February 1991. It sold 55,000 copies on its first day and was swiftly brought to other regions and platforms. Jon Dye, another former KACC attendee, was hired later that year to bring the game to the ZX Spectrum.
Lemmings had 20 million lifetime sales across 21 platforms. At 25 years old, Jones became a millionaire and subsequently bought multiple luxury cars. The company rapidly expanded and began working on several additional projects. As Psygnosis sought DMA Design to produce Lemmings expansion packs and sequels in the wake of this success, the studio developed Oh No! More Lemmings, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, and All New World of Lemmings. It also made the Christmas-themed Holiday Lemmings to be distributed for free on covermounts in 1991 and 1992, before Psygnosis made it a commercial release for 1993 and 1994.
By November 1992, DMA Design had grown to 22 staff, including 10 former classmates of Jones, and relocated to proper offices at the Dundee Technology Park. As Kay left DMA Design in 1993 to form Visual Sciences, Jones and Dailly hired Keith Hamilton as a replacement and put him in charge of All New World of Lemmings. This entry focused on larger, more detailed lemmings, which Hamilton and Jones later believed diminished the game's charm. In the same year, Psygnosis released the Amiga-exclusive Walker and Hired Guns, which had been created principally by Scott Johnston with a story by Hammond. All New World of Lemmings was the final game in Jones's original deal with Psygnosis. With the studio experiencing fatigue for the Lemmings series, Psygnosis hired other developers for subsequent entries, including Kay and Visual Sciences for Lemmings Paintball.