Rockstar North

David Jones founded DMA Design in 1988 in his home town of Dundee, at the age of 22. While still studying he had written Menace, which Psygnosis released in October 1988 under a six-game deal. While working on the sequel, Blood Money (1989), he dropped out of university and hired friends from the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, including Mike Dailly, Steve Hammond and Russell Kay. The first office sat above a former fish and chip shop.

Lemmings (1991) grew out of an animation of tiny characters by Dailly and led to several sequels, ending with All New World of Lemmings (1994), its last game for Psygnosis. Deals with Nintendo and BMG Interactive followed, and with BMG it signed Race'n'Chase, the project that became Grand Theft Auto (1997). With the studio in financial trouble, Jones sold it to Gremlin Interactive in 1997, and in September 1999 Take-Two, which had set up Rockstar Games, bought it from Infogrames.

Grand Theft Auto III (2001), made in Edinburgh and the first game in the series fully in 3D, is regarded as genre-defining. In 2002 the studio was folded into Rockstar Games and in May it took the name Rockstar North. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), Manhunt (2003), Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004), Grand Theft Auto IV (2008) and Grand Theft Auto V (2013) followed, the last of them the second-best-selling game of all time.

From Edinburgh, it also worked with other Rockstar studios on Red Dead Redemption (2010), L.A. Noire (2011), Max Payne 3 (2012) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Studio president Leslie Benzies announced his departure in 2016 and then sued Rockstar Games and Take-Two; the case was settled in 2019. In October 2025 Rockstar Games fired 31 of the studio's employees, a move the IWGB union called union busting. In November, Grand Theft Auto VI, Rockstar's next release, was delayed.