Bully (video game)

• 1. Introduction

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  Bully, a 2006 action-adventure game from Rockstar Vancouver and Rockstar Games, begins with a boy who has already been expelled from seven schools. His name is James Hopkins, known as Jimmy, he is 15 years old, and he is about to be left at an eighth. In PAL regions the game carried a Latin title, Canis Canem Edit, which means dog eat dog.

  The premise sounds like a recipe for cruelty. Yet the player's goal is to climb the social order of a boarding school in order to stop the bullying. How does a delinquent become the one who restores peace? What does it take to unite students who despise each other?

  The game also ran into trouble far beyond its fictional campus. It met a courtroom hearing, a retailer's refusal and an outright national ban. And years later, a sequel that many players wanted turned out to have been started and then quietly dropped.

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• 2. A Town of Cliques

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  Jimmy's mother and her new husband go off on their honeymoon, and that is why he spends a full year at Bullworth Academy. The school sits in the fictional New England town of Bullworth. Its neo-Gothic campus was styled after private schools and colleges in the United Kingdom and New England, with Fettes College in Edinburgh named as one comparison.

  The campus is where the game begins, and the rest of the town opens up gradually as the story moves on. There are four main districts. Bullworth Town is the commercial borough. Old Bullworth Vale is a suburb of mansions, with a beach and a funfair. New Coventry is a run-down area of tenement housing. Blue Skies Industrial Park holds factories, the town docks and a trailer park. Between that industrial park and the academy stands the Happy Volts Asylum, a psychiatric institute.

  The story covers an entire school year, so the town changes with the seasons. The shift is most obvious in the third chapter, which unfolds around Christmas.

  Six chapters carry Jimmy through the school's social ranks. The student groups are the Bullies, Nerds, Preppies, Greasers and Jocks, with the Townies as a sixth set of archetypes. Missions give out cash and items, and they raise or lower each group's respect for him. A group that thinks highly of Jimmy acts friendly and can even be hired as bodyguards. A group that despises him attacks on sight.

  Between missions, Jimmy can go to class, and each class is a minigame. Every course has five lessons of rising difficulty, and passing all five completes the course. The rewards are practical. English lets him apologize to authority figures after breaking a rule. Chemistry lets him make throwable weapons of his own. Geography marks collectibles on the minimap, and Gym teaches new fighting moves. Skipping a class that is available counts as a rule violation, unless he has already completed it.

  Jimmy has a playful arsenal. It includes slingshots, bags of marbles, itching powder, stink bombs, bottle rockets, baseball bats and spud guns. He gets around by skateboard, scooter, bicycle or go-kart. He can grab the back of a moving car while on a skateboard, but he cannot drive one.

  Breaking the rules triggers a trouble meter on the screen. Prefects, policemen and orderlies try to grab him, and at the highest level he cannot fight back at all. If he is busted, his weapons are taken, except the slingshot, the skateboard and the camera. He returns to the police station or the principal's office. If a class is under way, he is hauled into it instead, even one he has already passed.

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• 3. Taking Over the Cliques

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  Dr. Crabblesnitch, the principal, greets Jimmy on arrival and urges him to behave. The voice behind Jimmy is the actor Gerry Rosenthal, and Ralph Gunderman plays the principal. Jimmy soon befriends two students, Gary Smith and Peter Kowalski, who goes by Petey. Together they set out to dominate the school's cliques.

  Gary is the first to turn. Growing paranoid, he betrays Jimmy and sets him up against Russell Northrop, the leader of the Bullies, in an underground fight. Jimmy wins, and he makes Russell stop tormenting other students. That earns Jimmy the Bullies' respect and sets the pattern for the months ahead.

  The Preppies come next. Gary manipulates them against Jimmy just as he starts winning them over. So Jimmy enters a boxing tournament hosted by their leader, Derby Harrington. He wins it, but the Preppies still refuse to accept him. They attack together and are beaten.

  The Greasers are a more tangled case. Their leader, Johnny Vincent, wants proof that his girlfriend Lola Lombardi is having an affair with Gord Vendome, a Preppy. Jimmy helps expose it. Then he is forced to make peace with the Preppies by vandalizing Greaser territory, and the Greasers turn on him. Gary tips Johnny off about Jimmy's closeness to Lola. Jimmy is lured into an ambush, defeats the Greasers, and takes over their leadership.

  The Jocks are regarded as the most powerful clique, so Jimmy looks for help from their rivals, the Nerds. They refuse, and he beats their leader, Earnest Jones, which wins the Nerds over. Jimmy promises they will never be picked on again. Earnest then asks Jimmy to take improper photographs of Mandy Wiles, the head cheerleader. The pictures spread across town, which only enrages the Jocks and saddens Mandy. Out of pity, Jimmy defends the Nerds' hideout from a Jock attack and removes the pictures, and Mandy comes to care for him.

  Jimmy then sabotages the Jocks' big football game and beats their leader, Ted Thompson, in front of the entire school. Every clique now answers to him. Yet one of his oldest allies has been quietly planning something very different.

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• 4. Gary's Revenge

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  The vandalism of Bullworth's town hall is the trap Gary builds for his former friend. He persuades the clique leaders to pressure Jimmy into carrying it out. He also recruits the Townies, former Bullworth students who want revenge on the school, to stage dangerous pranks on the cliques. The goal is to make everyone blame Jimmy's leadership. Gary then tells Crabblesnitch about the town hall, and he is named head boy. Jimmy is expelled.

  Petey refuses to let him give up. To win over the Townies, Jimmy turns to Zoe Taylor, a member who was expelled after accusing the school's sports teacher and coach, Mr. Burton, of sexual harassment. Burton is described as predatory. Jimmy helps Zoe take her revenge on him. The pair then storm the Townies' hangout with Russell's help and confront their leader, Edgar Munsen.

  After beating Edgar, Jimmy explains how Gary used them both. The Townies side with him.

  Meanwhile Gary and his followers take Crabblesnitch hostage, and the cliques erupt into open war. Russell and the Townies help Jimmy subdue the clique leaders. That clears his path to Gary inside the main school building. He chases Gary to the roof, where their fight ends when both crash through into the principal's office.

  Freed, Crabblesnitch expels Gary, fires Burton for his predatory acts and names Petey head boy. He also lets Jimmy and Zoe return to the school. Outside, as friends, teachers and allies cheer, Jimmy kisses Zoe.

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• 5. Making a Rebel

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  The engine behind Bully was RenderWare, and Rockstar announced the game in May 2005 for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. The original target was October 2005. The game finally arrived on the 17th of October 2006, on the PlayStation 2 alone.

  The developers wanted to capture the feeling of being a child and make it fun. Parallels were drawn between Jimmy and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. Both come from difficult homes and both have been thrown out of several private schools.

  The villain changed along the way. Dr. Crabblesnitch, the pompous principal, was first introduced as the main antagonist. That role later went to Gary Smith, the student who begins as Jimmy's friend. He is described as a sociopath, and he admits to being a narcissist who thinks he is smarter and better than everyone and wants to run the school.

  On the 19th of July 2007, Rockstar announced a remaster subtitled Scholarship Edition. Rockstar New England, then called Mad Doc Software, led the Xbox 360 version, while Rockstar Toronto ported it to the Wii. Both appeared on the 4th of March 2008. A Windows port from Rockstar New England followed on the 21st of October 2008.

  The Wii, Xbox 360 and Anniversary Edition releases added a two-player mode. Players compete for the top score in the same minigames used for classes, one as Jimmy and the other as Gary Smith.

  The game kept travelling. It was re-released for PlayStation 4 through PlayStation Network on the 22nd of March 2016. War Drum Studios then developed the Anniversary Edition, an updated version of the Scholarship Edition, for Android and iOS on the 8th of December 2016.

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• 6. Reviews and Awards

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  Critics gave Bully generally favorable reviews, according to the aggregator Metacritic. Daniel Wilks of Hyper praised a "clever script, some novel missions, and well constructed characters." He also faulted its "time dilation, dodgy camera, and generic mini-games."

  One reviewer, Bonnie Ruberg of Joystiq, welcomed the casual way the game lets Jimmy kiss other boys. In 2013, Larry Hester of Complex ranked Jimmy among the coolest LGBT video game characters.

  By March 2008, Take-Two Interactive said the PlayStation 2 version had sold 1.5 million copies. In the United Kingdom, the industry body ELSPA gave it a Platinum sales award, which marks at least 300,000 copies sold there.

  The awards list is long. GameSpot gave the game its prize for Best Original Music and named it a Game of the Year 2006 finalist. The Interactive Achievement Awards nominated Gerry Rosenthal for his performance as Jimmy, and Maine Anders for her performance as Christy Martin. Gaming Target put it on a list of 52 games still worth playing from 2006. The book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die included it in 2010.

  The remaster won a more mixed welcome. The Wii and Xbox 360 versions drew favorable reviews, with IGN scoring them 8 and 8.7 out of 10. The Windows version got mixed ones. 1UP.com gave it a C- and said it "feels like a rush job." Players also reported crashes and instability on some Xbox 360 consoles. A patch arrived on the 20th of March, though some players said the problems continued or worsened.

  The Windows 10 release of July 2015 brought more reports of constant crashes. A fan's unofficial patch fixed many of them.

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• 7. Courtrooms and Bans

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  Before Bully reached shelves, groups such as Bullying Online and Peaceaholics criticized it for glorifying or trivializing school bullying. Parents and educators worried too, given the adult content in earlier Rockstar games, including the Hot Coffee minigame from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The ability to kiss both girls and boys was known to the ESRB when it rated the game.

  Ratings boards mostly kept the game to a teenage audience. The ESRB gave it a T, the British Board of Film Classification a 15, the Australian Classification Board an M, and New Zealand's OFLC restricted it to ages 13 and over. In 2007, Yahoo! Games called it one of the ten most controversial games of all time.

  The sharpest legal fight came from Jack Thompson, who filed a lawsuit in Florida to keep the game off store shelves. He called it a "nuisance" and a "Columbine simulator." His petition asked Wal-Mart and Take-Two Interactive for an advance copy so a third party could judge it.

  Take-Two offered a different arrangement. On the 12th of October 2006, a copy would be shown to both the judge and Thompson in the judge's chambers. On the 13th of October 2006, Judge Ronald Friedman ruled that the game could ship. He noted that nothing in it was absent from late night television. Thompson answered with a fiery speech aimed at the judge.

  The mainstream American media, shown a preview build, took a mostly positive view. Coverage stressed building a social network and learning skills in class, with strict punishment for serious misbehaviour.

  In the United Kingdom, the Labour MP Keith Vaz argued that the game should be banned or rated 18. It was released as a 15. Currys and PC World, both owned by DSG International, said they did not wish to sell it, calling it unsuitable for their family-friendly image. Game, HMV and Virgin Megastores still planned to stock it.

  In April 2008, a Brazilian judge prohibited the sale and import of Bully, relying on findings from the state psychology society. Brazil released it officially on the 23rd of June 2016.

  There was one more unusual claim. In July 2008, the German comedian Michael "Bully" Herbig sued Take-Two, worried that a link to a violent game could harm his image. The court dismissed it, finding no trademark or personal-name rights had been infringed.

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• 8. The Sequel That Never Shipped

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  In November 2006, Michael Pachter, a research director at Wedbush Morgan Securities, predicted that Bully would not sell well enough over the holidays to justify a sequel. He was wrong. He apologized to Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive and called a sequel a possibility.

  Rockstar acquired Mad Doc Studios in April 2008 and renamed it Rockstar New England. After finishing the Scholarship Edition, the studio helped other Rockstar teams with downloadable content for Grand Theft Auto IV and with Red Dead Redemption. Near the end of that period, Rockstar greenlit early production on Bully 2 there.

  Former employees told Game Informer that the whole studio, between 50 and 80 people, had worked on it at one point. They described an open world three times the size of the first map, approaching that of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Many more buildings would have been enterable, and more artificial intelligence would have let player choices matter later. Technology built for the project ended up in Max Payne 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2.

  Accounts of the timeline differ. One says that by around 2009 the team had a playable vertical slice of six to eight hours, two to three years from a final version. Rockstar laid off about 10 percent of the studio in June 2009, and in 2010 it began moving staff to other projects.

  A 2019 report from Video Games Chronicle, citing inside sources, said production began in May 2010 and lasted eighteen months. It said work stopped before the end of 2013 because the project lacked traction. A small slice was reportedly built on the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, known as RAGE. In 2025, after leaving Rockstar, Dan Houser said he believed "bandwidth issues" had stalled development.

  Hopes stayed alive in the meantime. In November 2009, the composer Shawn Lee said he expected to score Bully 2. In November 2011, Houser told Gamasutra that Rockstar might turn to a sequel after Max Payne 3. He explained that Rockstar likes to "take a little bit of time at the end of a game before starting a sequel." In September 2013, he said he had many ideas for one.

  On the 28th of August 2017, concept art rumoured to come from a sequel leaked online, showing new characters and a run-down suburban home. Rockstar made no comment. In July 2019, a former Rockstar New England employee said the story would have shown Jimmy spending summer vacation with his mother and step-siblings at his stepfather's mansion. A source later confirmed that opening.

  Fans finally built their own continuation. A group of modders called Fat Pigeon, led by the YouTuber Swegta, revealed an unofficial online multiplayer mod, Bully Online, in October 2025. It launched on the 15th of December 2025. On the 14th of January 2026, it was shut down indefinitely. The developers said the shutdown was "not something we wanted," and some journalists and fans suspected Rockstar or Take-Two had forced it.

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