Rockstar North

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Rockstar North Limited
Rockstar North's present logo.
Type Private
Founded 1988
Headquarters Edinburgh, Scotland
Industry Game development
Products Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Lemmings
Parent Rockstar Games

Rockstar North Limited (formerly DMA Design Limited) is a Scottish developer of computer and video games founded by David Jones in Dundee and presently located in Leith Street, Edinburgh, Scotland. The company is a part of Rockstar Games which is owned by Take Two Interactive. It is the primary developer of the Grand Theft Auto series, including Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which are three of the best-selling games on sixth-generation consoles; in its earlier guise as DMA, it was responsible for originating the monumentally successful Lemmings franchise.

Contents

[edit] History

[edit] Formation

The name DMA was originally taken from the Amiga programming manuals simply because it sounded cool and did not actually mean anything. The initials were later 'retrofitted' so that they briefly stood for Direct Mind Access, a play on the computer term Direct Memory Access and (though never officially) Dundee Modern Arts, prior to the company's relocation to Edinburgh. Other names that were considered were "Visual Voyage" and "Alias Smith and Jones". As a joke, the developers of DMA once said that the name stands for "Doesn't Mean Anything".

[edit] Late 1980s: Menace and Blood Money

In 1988 DMA signed with influential UK label Psygnosis and scored two early successes with Menace and Blood Money -- side-scrolling space shooters which gained attention from gamers and critics for both their high-quality presentation and punishing level of difficulty. As with all the company's early games, Menace and Blood Money debuted on the Amiga, leading platform for videogames in Europe between the late Eighties and the early Nineties. A Commodore 64 port was published immediately after, later followed by DOS and Atari ST versions.

[edit] Early 1990s: Lemmings, Body Harvest and Grand Theft Auto

DMA's major breakthrough came with 1990's Lemmings, a deviously simple puzzle game that went on to sell over 20 million copies on 21 different systems (debuting as usual on the Amiga and ranging from other major platforms like the NES and Macintosh to such relatively obscure formats as the FM Towns and the Philips CD-i). Much of DMA's time over the next few years was devoted to Lemmings follow-ups (Oh No! More Lemmings, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, All New World of Lemmings, and two Christmas-themed Holiday Lemmings special editions), although they did manage to release two original titles: 1993's Walker (a coolly-received side-scrolling mech shooter) and 1994's Hired Guns (an innovative first-person strategy game with a four-way split screen). Other Lemmings sequels and spinoffs, such as Lemmings Paintball and Lemmings 3D, have appeared over the years, but these were produced without DMA's involvement.

1994's Uniracers, a 2D platform racer featuring riderless unicycles with a heavy emphasis on stunts, was the company's first game to debut on a console (the Super Nintendo). Published by Nintendo, it also marked DMA's first game without Psygnosis -- their publisher since Menace -- and the beginning of what would be a long and often bumpy relationship with the Japanese console giant.

After spending some time experimenting with various next-generation consoles (particularly the 3DO), DMA was asked by Nintendo to join their "Dream Team" of developers for the upcoming Ultra 64 system (later renamed Nintendo 64), alongside such other developers as Rare, Paradigm, Midway Games, and LucasArts. Under this arrangement, DMA would produce an N64-exclusive title that Nintendo would publish. The result of this collaboration was Body Harvest, a third-person 3D vehicular action game with a storyline about aliens arriving on Earth at various points in history to harvest mankind for food. However, whereas Psygnosis took a hands-off approach towards its outside developers, Nintendo was more demanding, requiring a number of major overhauls to the original design (most notably the addition of puzzle and role-playing elements, intended to make the game more appealing to the Japanese market). The game underwent numerous delays, and Nintendo finally decided to drop their publishing plans. Midway picked up the rights and finally released it in 1998 -- nearly three years after the game was first shown at the N64's Japanese unveiling. Reaction was mostly favourable, in particular for the game's innovation and free-roaming gameplay, although a few gamers criticized the decidedly sub-par graphics (no doubt a result of the inordinately long production schedule).

In the interim, the company released (through the short-lived BMG Interactive label) Grand Theft Auto for the PC and PlayStation, which applied the Body Harvest play mechanism of allowing control of any vehicle in the environment to a top-down 2D game of cops-and-robbers, putting the player in the role of a petty hood who works his way up through the criminal ranks in three fictional U.S. cities; Liberty City, Vice City, and San Andreas. Despite its undetailed retro graphics and tongue-in-cheek humour, GTA (as it was soon known) still attracted controversy for its violence, with the Daily Mail characteristically calling for an outright ban. The uproar no doubt contributed in some part to making GTA DMA's biggest success since Lemmings, but its most distinguishing feature was the incredible degree of freedom afforded to the player, with vast, fully explorable cities and dozens of optional missions. DMA's second N64 title, Space Station Silicon Valley, was yet another take on the multiple vehicles concept, this time in a 3D platforming environment and with robotic animals -- each with unique abilities, such as hovering sheep and turret-equipped turtles -- instead of cars and trucks.

[edit] Late 1990s: A change of publishers

In 1997, DMA was bought by British publisher Gremlin Interactive, with Jones becoming Creative Director of both companies. Gremlin published two DMA titles -- the UK release of Body Harvest and the PC version of Wild Metal Country, a seemingly simplistic tank combat game with a complex control scheme and extremely realistic physics. However in turn in 1999 Gremlin was acquired by French publisher Infogrames for £24 million. Complicating this sale was the pre-existing deal between DMA and BMG Interactive, which had published the first version of Grand Theft Auto, and by 1999 itself had gone through some complex financial moves, becoming Rockstar Games, an internal label of publisher Take Two. For this reason, Infogrames sold DMA Design to Take Two. Rockstar published the Dreamcast version of Wild Metal Country (retitled simply Wild Metal) and Grand Theft Auto 2 for the PC, PlayStation and Dreamcast.

Prior to DMA becoming part of Rockstar, Jones left, setting up a new development studio in Dundee as a subsidiary of Rage Software. Through a management buy-out, this later became Real Time Worlds.

[edit] 2000s: More Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, and beyond

Whereas GTA2 had been an incremental improvement on the original, keeping the top-down 2D perspective and adding a few new features (namely a somewhat complicated system of forging alliances and rivalries with numerous competing gangs), 2001's Grand Theft Auto III was a huge step forward, bringing the series into full 3D. It was notable in this respect for being the first high profile game to use middleware technology; in this case Criterion Software's RenderWare graphics engine. It became the PlayStation 2's biggest system seller in both the U.S. and Europe; Sony, realising that the game was a sure-fire success, paid Rockstar to keep it a PS2 exclusive for some time. Rockstar bought DMA outright, renaming the company "Rockstar North" in early 2002. That same year saw the release of a PC version of GTA III, as well as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City for the PS2, which retained the engine and core gameplay of GTA3 while adding a number of refinements (plus a roster of top Hollywood voice talent). In 2003, the company released a PC port of Vice City, as well as a two-pack of both GTA III and Vice City for Microsoft's Xbox console (ported by Rockstar Vienna).

Manhunt was released for the PS2 in 2003. The game is a violent stealth adventure in which an apparently executed death-row inmate finds himself the star of a Running Man-esque game show, fleeing expert killers in a struggle for survival. Rockstar North released Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PS2 in October 2004, and ports to Xbox and PC followed in 2005. The studio is currently working on Grand Theft Auto 4 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It is due to be released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in October 2007.

Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, a new installment for PlayStation Portable, was released in October 2005. It was developed by Rockstar Leeds, under Rockstar North's supervision. It has been ported to the PlayStation 2 and features a slightly better framerate and draw distance than its PSP counterpart. A second PSP Grand Theft Auto title, Vice City Stories, was also developed by Rockstar Leeds, under Rockstar North's supervision for PSP, and released in October 2006. It was also ported to the PlayStation 2

[edit] Unfinished projects

DMA's history is also marked by several announced projects that were subsequently cancelled in mid-development: Nintendo 64 ports of Wild Metal Country and the original GTA; Clan Wars (a real-time 3D castle building and siege game set in medieval Scotland); Attack! (a caveman-themed platformer for the N64); and a port of Epic Games' PC hit Unreal for the Nintendo 64 disk drive.

[edit] Games

as DMA Design

as Rockstar North

[edit] External links

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