Rockstar San Diego

Rockstar San Diego started life as Angel Studios, a work-for-hire animation studio that Colombian entrepreneur Diego Angel founded in January 1984 in Carlsbad, California, after studying film in Chicago. It made educational videos, commercials and visual effects; its best-known work includes the computer graphics for the film The Lawnmower Man (1992) and the video for Peter Gabriel's 'Kiss That Frog', which won the special effects award at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.

Its demos for Silicon Graphics computers caught Nintendo's eye, and in 1995 Nintendo named it part of its 'Dream Team' of outside studios for the Nintendo 64. For that console it made two Ken Griffey Jr. baseball games (1998 and 1999) and the port of Resident Evil 2 (1999), which squeezed the original's two discs onto a single cartridge. For Microsoft it developed Midtown Madness (1999) and Midtown Madness 2 (2000).

Midtown Madness caught the attention of Rockstar Games, and together they created the Midnight Club and Smuggler's Run series. In November 2002 Take-Two bought the studio and folded it into Rockstar Games as Rockstar San Diego. It went on to make Red Dead Revolver (2004), a project Capcom had dropped, and Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis (2006), the first game on the RAGE engine, which the studio develops and most Rockstar games use. Diego Angel left in 2005. Red Dead Redemption (2010) was a critical and commercial success, although its development was marred by complaints about working conditions.

Since 2011 it has mostly worked alongside other Rockstar studios: it supported L.A. Noire (2011) and collaborated on Max Payne 3 (2012), Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). Tom Shepherd and Joshua Bass have led it since 2019. It is still based in Carlsbad and is part of Rockstar Games, owned by Take-Two Interactive.