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 Headquarters at Barclay House | |
| Rockstar North | |
| Formerly |
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| Company type | Subsidiary |
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | 1988 in Dundee, Scotland |
| Founder | David Jones |
| Headquarters | , Scotland |
Key people | Andrew Semple (studio director) |
| Products |
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Number of employees | 650 (2018) |
| Parent |
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| Website | rockstarnorth.com |
Rockstar North (Rockstar Games UK Limited; formerly DMA Design Limited and Rockstar North Limited) 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 Menace 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, whom he had met at the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club—and 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.
Starting in 1994, DMA Design partnered with Nintendo and BMG Interactive for several projects, many of which stalled or were cancelled. Jones sold the financially stricken studio to Gremlin Interactive in April 1997, which also led to the spin-off of DMA Design's satellite studio in Boulder, Colorado, and Hammond's departure. After BMG Interactive released DMA Design's Grand Theft Auto in November 1997 to commercial success, Take-Two Interactive bought the publisher and the game's intellectual property to form Rockstar Games in December 1998. At the same time, Body Harvest's underperformance led Infogrames to purchase Gremlin Interactive, with DMA Design sold to Take-Two in September 1999. The studio was aligned with Rockstar Games, which soon released 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 (2002), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), and Grand Theft Auto V (2013), 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 (2007), Red Dead Redemption (2010), L.A. Noire (2011), Max Payne 3 (2012), and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018).