Rockstar North

• 1. Introduction

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  Rockstar North, the Edinburgh studio behind Grand Theft Auto V, began its life in Dundee under another name. By March 2024, that game had sold 200 million copies, making it the second-best-selling video game ever. It is also described as the most profitable entertainment product of all time. The Grand Theft Auto series as a whole has reached 425 million sales.

  The same company once made Lemmings, a puzzle game about tiny creatures marching toward disaster. Between those two successes lie mergers, lawsuits, cancelled games and a founder who left just as his studio's defining project took shape.

  This documentary asks how a handful of friends from a local computer club built something so large. It asks why so many owners passed the company around in the late 1990s. And it asks why a studio of this size ended 2025 with protesters outside its own doors.

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• 2. Kingsway Club Friends

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  In 1983, David Jones took an apprenticeship at the Timex plant in his hometown of Dundee. Timex was best known for watches, but the Dundee factory also built the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum for Sinclair Research. Those home computers had stirred up local interest in hobby programming.

  Timex paid for its staff to take programming courses at Kingsway Technical College. The college also hosted the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club. Jones, the oldest attendee, soon befriended Steve Hammond and Russell Kay. Mike Dailly joined in 1984, at 14 the youngest member, bringing a Plus/4 computer he had received for Christmas. The four shared one ambition. They wanted to invent original games rather than play or copy the ones already on sale.

  Their first sales were small. Dailly and Hammond finished Freek Out for the Plus/4 and sold it to the publisher Cascade for "a modest fee". Jones and Kay built Moonshadow for the ZX Spectrum, which eventually came out as Zone Trooper.

  Then the ground shifted. Sinclair Research lost much of its market share during 1986, and Timex laid off workers in Dundee. Jones accepted voluntary redundancy worth roughly half a year of salary and spent it on an Amiga 1000. He enrolled in computer science at the Dundee Institute of Technology, where Hammond also studied. All four soon joined the institute's computer club.

  The first year of the course came easily to Jones, which left him time to teach himself Amiga programming. He spent a year on a shoot 'em up called CopperCon1, working from his parents' bedroom under the provisional name Acme. The artwork came from Tony Smith, a member of the demoscene who dealt with Jones by post. Dailly and Hammond recorded the sound effects from a Salamander machine at a local arcade.

  At the Personal Computer World Show, Jones went looking for a publisher. He first agreed terms with Hewson Consultants but backed out, afraid his game would simply become the Amiga version of Zynaps. In 1987 he turned to the young company Psygnosis and agreed to a six-game deal. The game went from CopperCon1 to Draconia, and then to Menace because Draconia sounded too much like Draconus. Psygnosis also hired him to bring its game Ballistix from the Amiga to the Commodore 64, and Jones engaged Dailly and Hammond to help.

  The name Acme was already taken, so in 1988 Jones polled the institute's computer club for alternatives. Suggestions included Milliard, Visual Voyage and Alias Smith and Jones, a nod to the artist behind Menace. He settled on DMA Design. In Amiga manuals, the letters stood for direct memory access, but the company name carried no such meaning. For a short time the company said Direct Mind Access. Jones later took to saying it stood for "Doesn't Mean Anything".

  He formally founded the company in 1988, aged 22. Menace, still in development, was about to become its debut game.

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• 3. Lemmings Luck

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  Menace reached shops in October 1988 after 18 months of work, as the first release on Psygnosis's budget label Psyclapse. Jones earned only a tiny royalty on each copy, a deal he later called "terrible". Still, 20,000 sales paid for a car and regular trips to the Psygnosis offices, where he met other developers.

  While he worked on the sequel, Blood Money, his university course grew much harder. Against his professors' advice, he dropped out, meaning to return after a year. He never finished the degree, though he later received an honorary one. In 1989 he hired Dailly, who had just been expelled from college, as the first employee. Hammond joined part-time while he continued his studies. Kay followed, along with Brian Watson, a university friend of Jones. Blood Money arrived in April 1989 and sold 40,000 copies.

  The company's first premises were lent by Jones's father-in-law, who owned a Dundee shop called The Deep Sea. The space sat at 134B Nethergate, in an 1893 building sometimes nicknamed Wee Pink Nethergate House. The office opened on the 1st of August 1989.

  Not every idea survived 1990. The team shelved Gore!, a game inspired by Golden Axe, because the Amiga's technical limits held it back. The platformer Cutiepoo stalled after a year with the freelance programmer Tony Colgan. Jones set aside his own game Walker, unable to reach his vision for it. He also dropped the Monster Cartridge, an Amiga cheat cartridge, after a rival product shipped first.

  The next hit grew out of Walker's technology. In Edinburgh, the programmer Ian Dunlop and the artist Neill Glancy were experimenting with it, using characters just sixteen pixels tall. Dailly heard this and challenged himself to make recognisable characters at half that height. During one lunch break, he animated a demo of tiny figures walking in a line and dying in comic ways. The office laughed. Kay said a game could come from it.

  Jones imagined a design in which the player stops the characters from being killed. Kay wrote a demo, which passed to Dailly and then to Jones. Jones worked out the basic play with Gary Timmons. Kay also suggested the name Lemmings.

  Lemmings was released in February 1991 and sold 55,000 copies on its first day. It went on to 20 million lifetime sales across 21 platforms. At 25, Jones became a millionaire and bought several luxury cars. Jon Dye, another former club attendee, was hired to bring the game to the ZX Spectrum.

  By November 1992, the staff numbered 22, ten of them Jones's former classmates, and the company moved to the Dundee Technology Park. Psygnosis kept asking for more: Oh No! More Lemmings in 1991, Lemmings 2: The Tribes in 1993 and All New World of Lemmings in 1994. Kay left in 1993 to form Visual Sciences, and Keith Hamilton took charge of the last of these. Hamilton and Jones later felt its larger, more detailed lemmings drained the game's charm. With the studio tired of the series, Psygnosis gave later entries to other developers, including Kay's Visual Sciences for Lemmings Paintball.

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• 4. Too Many Projects

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  In April 1994, DMA Design was announced as only the second outside partner for Nintendo's upcoming console, then called Project Reality. The deal began at a trade show, where Jones showed a full-motion Star Wars video clip running on the Super Nintendo, something previously thought impossible. Psygnosis had briefly asked the studio to emulate an in-development Star Wars game on that machine. Nintendo signed DMA Design to a two-game contract worth several million pounds and added it to its "Dream Team" of external partners.

  The money changed the studio's habits. It grew to fill 2500 square feet at the Dundee Technology Park and outfitted every room with high-end equipment. It stopped developing for the 3DO. It also avoided the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, because Jones disliked "multiformat publishing for the sake of it".

  The first Nintendo project was Unirally, a racing game starring animated unicycles. After its 1994 release on the Super Nintendo, the studio Pixar sued Nintendo, claiming the characters resembled the unicycle hero of its 1987 short film Red's Dream. The judge sided with Pixar. Nintendo agreed to stop producing copies, and Pixar received a Nintendo 64 development kit. Even so, the game sold 300,000 copies.

  Next came Kid Kirby, a spin-off made by Tony Colgan, who had asked Jones for a second chance. It featured a young version of the title character, who was to be flung around levels with the Super NES Mouse. In November 1994, a team of five began Body Harvest, planned as a launch title for the Nintendo 64.

  Meanwhile, Dailly was testing ways to draw 3D buildings from a top-down view. To show off the technique, he built a game in which the player steered a dinosaur through a city, smashing it. Cars were added to make the streets livelier. A colleague then suggested letting the player drive them instead. Jones passed the project to a team, and it became known as Race'n'Chase.

  The Liaison and Promotion Company had handled the studio's marketing since July 1993, and it introduced DMA Design to possible partners. Jones showed a prototype to BMG Interactive, the new games arm of Bertelsmann. A contract followed in March 1995 for four games: Race'n'Chase, Space Station Silicon Valley, Tanktics and the stealth game Covert. The marketing firm says Jones never told it a deal was close. The relationship ended just before the contract was finalised, and a legal dispute began when DMA Design refused to pay.

  The studio used the funds to grow from a headcount of 40 toward 130. It took an extra 5000 square feet in two adjacent buildings. It built a motion capture studio that saw little use. It also housed DMA Music, with seven full-time musicians.

  Race'n'Chase formally began production in March 1995. The team was mostly recent graduates, with Hamilton as lead programmer, and they struggled until Gary Penn moved over from BMG Interactive as creative director and producer. BMG's own production team, including development head Sam Houser, stayed hands-off.

  Elsewhere, trouble piled up. Body Harvest moved slowly and missed the Nintendo 64 launch. Kid Kirby and the climbing game Zenith stalled, and Nintendo cancelled the former after the Super NES Mouse sold poorly. BMG's American division repeatedly pushed to cancel Race'n'Chase over missed milestones. At one point the studio had seven or eight projects running at once. Jones agreed to some of them only for the sign-on bonuses, with no plan to finish them.

  In late 1996, GT Interactive signed Attack! and Clan Wars, though neither had a proper team. In November 1996, the studio opened a satellite in Boulder, Colorado, which had 27 employees by April 1997. Jones also sold the rights to Grand Theft Auto to BMG Interactive to help the studio survive. That sale would reach Take-Two the following year.

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• 5. Changing Owners

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  In April 1997, Gremlin Interactive bought DMA Design, after Nintendo cancelled Body Harvest following clashing demands from its Japanese and American branches. Jones, with the studio still in financial disarray, wanted it to focus on making games. Gremlin admired the studio's multi-use 3DMA engine and expected a profit within two years.

  Its management style grated. Gremlin introduced Microsoft Project and Gantt charts, which staff saw as pointless bureaucracy. It also pushed the studio to finish games fast, whereas Jones had preferred to release a game only once it was good. Jones received a 5% stake in Gremlin and a board seat, and he became creative director. The studio had 100 employees in May.

  The acquisition also forced out the Boulder studio, which was spun off and renamed Devil's Thumb Entertainment. Hammond left DMA Design to write a remake of Hired Guns there, as a freelancer. He later said he regretted the move "ever since". VR-1, another Boulder developer, absorbed the studio in March 1999, and the remake was never released.

  By July 1997, the marketing firm had sued DMA Design for breach of contract over the BMG deal. Lord Penrose, hearing the case at the Court of Session, found DMA Design had taken a "rather cynical action" by shutting the firm out of the talks. He judged that this did breach the contract.

  BMG hired the publicist Max Clifford to market Race'n'Chase, now renamed Grand Theft Auto, using controversy. In May 1997, Baron Campbell of Croy warned about the game in the House of Lords, and several tabloids demanded a ban. Released in November 1997, it drew mixed reviews yet quickly sold 500,000 units. Kay programmed much of the PlayStation version at Visual Sciences, with Houser producing.

  In March 1998, Take-Two Interactive bought BMG Interactive, by then dormant, for 1.85 million shares. That brought Grand Theft Auto and Space Station Silicon Valley into its hands. Houser became Take-Two's vice president of worldwide product development. In December 1998, he and former BMG colleagues formed the Rockstar Games label there.

  The poor sales of Body Harvest then contributed to a takeover of Gremlin by the French publisher Infogrames in March 1999. Infogrames wanted child-friendly games and no stake in Grand Theft Auto. In September 1999, Take-Two bought DMA Design for a nominal price while assuming its debts. Houser called the pairing with Rockstar Games a "perfect match".

  Grand Theft Auto 2 arrived in October 1999 and quickly passed 1 million copies, a first for a Take-Two game. Jones was the last of the original team to work on the next game. He left in early 2000, unhappy with the overseas ownership, and formed Denki with three former colleagues. In 2002 he bought out the Dundee studio of Rage Software, forming Real Time Worlds. Dailly had meanwhile joined Kay at Visual Sciences in 1999.

  In March 2000, Take-Two closed the Dundee studio and moved many of its 35 staff to Edinburgh, laying off the rest. Managing director Jim Woods resigned because he wanted to stay in Dundee. A planned merger under the name Broadband Studios was abandoned, as was Grand Theft Auto: Online Crime World.

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• 6. Open World Breakthrough

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  After Grand Theft Auto 2, DMA Design opened a satellite studio in the Leith area of Edinburgh with 25 people, led by Andrew Semple. It housed the former teams of Body Harvest and Space Station Silicon Valley. Among them were Leslie Benzies, Aaron Garbut and Obbe Vermeij. Edinburgh pursued a 3D Grand Theft Auto modelled on Driver, while Dundee worked on a Miami expansion for the second game. The Edinburgh project won out and became Grand Theft Auto III.

  The game's total team reached 60, with a core of 20. Its plan was mostly settled from the start, so development ran smoothly. It kept the unconstrained open world of the earlier games and added full 3D graphics and a third-person view. Grand Theft Auto III reached the PlayStation 2 in late 2001. It sold 6 million copies in one year and more than 15 million in total, beating the team's expectations. It was the best-selling game of 2001 and the second-best in 2002.

  Critics called its approach genre-defining. It also spawned a category of imitators, including The Simpsons: Hit & Run, True Crime: Streets of LA, Driver 3 and Saints Row.

  Plans for an online multiplayer mode were dropped in favour of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It began as an expansion pack and grew into a standalone game. Because it reused the previous engine, programmers were not needed until six months before the end, and lessons from the last project helped designers plan faster. In March 2002, Take-Two folded DMA Design into Rockstar Games as Rockstar Studios, which Houser called the "final integration". The name changed to Rockstar North in May. Vice City took one year and came out in late 2002. At the first Develop Industry Excellence Awards in August 2003, the studio won "best in-house development studio" and "creativity".

  A zombie survival game called Z, set on a Scottish island, followed Vice City. It reused that game's code, but the concept lost traction after about a month. Manhunt, a stealth game released in 2003, took roughly three years. Its dark tone and realistic violence made it the studio's pet project, and most people at Rockstar Games wanted no part of it. It provoked controversy and still sold 1.5 million copies.

  Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas received an extra year of development, which let the team rework core parts of its gameplay and visuals. By the end, the studio had moved to offices on Calton Square in Edinburgh. San Andreas launched in October 2004 and sold 2.1 million copies in four days, 45% above Vice City's start. It was named "game of the year" at the 2004 Spike Video Game Awards and the 2005 Golden Joystick Awards. The three games were bundled as Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy in 2006. By 2008, they had sold 14.5 million, 17.5 million and 21.5 million copies respectively.

  Rockstar North also worked beside sister studios. It partnered with Rockstar Leeds on the handheld games Liberty City Stories, Vice City Stories and Chinatown Wars. It supported Rockstar San Diego's Red Dead Redemption in 2010, Team Bondi's L.A. Noire in 2011 and Max Payne 3 in 2012.

  Work on Grand Theft Auto V began right after Grand Theft Auto IV. The studio's 360 employees formed the core of a worldwide team of 1,000. Core development took roughly three years, and the game came out in September 2013. Within a day it set records as the best-selling and highest-grossing video game. Its online counterpart, Grand Theft Auto Online, kept the money coming for years.

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• 7. Lawsuits and Tax Credits

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  In 2014, Rockstar North took 75000 square feet at Barclay House on Holyrood Road in Edinburgh, a building constructed in 1999 for the newspaper group The Scotsman. That same year, the studio began receiving payments under the Video Games Tax Relief scheme, newly set up by the United Kingdom government. According to the think tank TaxWatch UK, it had collected 37% of the scheme's total payout by 2020, while paying no corporation tax since 2009. Rockstar Games answered that the credits allowed larger investment in the country. The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment reported that the scheme returned four times its cost to the British economy.

  In September 2014, Benzies went on sabbatical, and the art directors Garbut and Rob Nelson took over his duties as studio head. He did not return, and his departure was announced in January 2016.

  On the 12th of April 2016, Benzies sued Rockstar Games, Take-Two, Sam Houser and Dan Houser. He claimed they had withheld royalty payments after he left. He said the Houser brothers had persuaded him to take a six-month sabbatical, then fired his son and several friends while he was away. When he tried to come back in April 2015, he alleged, his building access was disabled and the office manager ordered him off the premises. The suit also said the three "Rockstar Principals" had set up a shell corporation to share profits evenly. And it accused Sam Houser of building a sexually charged culture at Rockstar Games.

  Take-Two quickly filed a counterclaim, calling Benzies's claims "entirely without merit and in many instances downright bizarre". It argued that because he left without good cause, he was owed nothing more. In April 2018, the New York Supreme Court partially dismissed his suit, ruling that the profit-sharing agreement did not promise the principals equal pay. He remained entitled to some royalties.

  Take-Two then accused Benzies of poaching Rockstar North staff for his new studio, Royal Circus Games. It also argued the name was chosen to confuse consumers. The studio was renamed Build a Rocket Boy in October 2018. After a confidential settlement, the case was dismissed on the 8th of February 2019.

  Red Dead Redemption 2 pooled all Rockstar Games studios into one team and came out in October 2018, by which time Rockstar North employed 650 people. In July 2021, the studio bought Barclay House, now its only tenant, along with the neighbouring Holyrood Park House. In 2022 it took another 11577 square feet in the latter.

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• 8. Firings and Union

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  On the 30th of October 2025, Rockstar Games fired 31 studio employees, citing public discussion and distribution of confidential information. The Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain, known as the IWGB, said the workers had been trying to unionise with organisers on Discord. Its president, Alex Marshall, called the firings "the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry".

  Protests organised by the IWGB began outside the studio on the 6th of November, backed by Ross Greer, co-leader of the Scottish Greens. The same day, Rockstar Games delayed Grand Theft Auto VI. Journalists doubted the firings caused the delay, but thought they could lead to missed deadlines. One Rockstar North employee said morale was "at rock bottom".

  On the 12th of November, the IWGB filed legal claims against Rockstar Games, citing its refusal to meet the union. More than 200 employees signed a petition demanding the workers be reinstated. Christine Jardine, the Member of Parliament for Edinburgh West, criticised the dismissals in the House of Commons. In December, the prime minister, Keir Starmer, called the events "deeply concerning" and said his ministers would investigate.

  In May 2026, workers at Rockstar North and Rockstar Games's four other UK studios formed the Rockstar Games Workers Union, under the IWGB Game Workers Union.

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