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Rockstar Games

Take-Two's New York label, and the publisher of Grand Theft Auto

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Rockstar Games was set up in New York in 1998 by Take-Two Interactive, with the brothers Sam and Dan Houser, who had come from BMG Interactive with Grand Theft Auto, among its founders. Take-Two bought DMA Design in 1999, and the label grew into a group of studios, led by Rockstar North in Edinburgh, that made Grand Theft Auto III, Red Dead Redemption and Grand Theft Auto V. Its games have drawn controversy from Manhunt to Hot Coffee, and so have its working conditions.

In the spring of 1999 Rockstar Games was making a film in the streets of New York to launch Grand Theft Auto 2. It had a real director, stuntmen, car chases and helicopter shots, and a cast of Russians, Yakuza and Hare Krishnas. Two of the Yakuza failed to turn up, someone reported a gang fight to the police, and the company’s marketing director, Terry Donovan, playing a Krishna, had his nose burst open by a fake baseball bat. Rockstar’s president, Sam Houser, summed up the approach to Edge: “We want to bring a bit of music industry sensibility to the games market. I think people are ready for a bit of style.” The label was then a few months old. Within three years it was publishing Grand Theft Auto III, and it went on to make Grand Theft Auto V, which has sold more than 230 million copies.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 1998, in New York, as a label of Take-Two Interactive.
  • Founders: Sam Houser, Dan Houser, Terry Donovan, Jamie King and Gary Foreman, according to Wikipedia.
  • Owner: Take-Two Interactive.
  • Studios: Rockstar North in Edinburgh, formerly DMA Design, and others in Britain and North America.
  • Best-known games: the Grand Theft Auto series, Max Payne 3, Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2.

From BMG to Rockstar

Rockstar began with a game it had not published. In March 1998 Take-Two bought most of the assets of BMG Interactive, the games division of the music company BMG, including the worldwide publishing rights to DMA Design’s Grand Theft Auto on the PC and PlayStation. Take-Two reported that GTA sold more than 630,000 copies in its financial year to October 1998, 7.6 per cent of its revenue.

Sam Houser had been executive producer of GTA, Edge noted, and according to Wikipedia he and his brother Dan were BMG Interactive executives who moved to New York to work for Take-Two. Wikipedia dates Rockstar’s founding to December 1998, and the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences gives the year as 1998. The name first appears in the period press in 1999: PC Zone’s chart for June 1999 credited GTA: London 1969, the first GTA mission pack, to Rockstar, and in the same month Edge expected “Take 2 subsidiary Rockstar Games” to show GTA2 and Max Payne at the E3 trade show. Take-Two’s annual report described Rockstar as its console label, pursuing “marketing relationships with participants in media industries such as music, magazines and sports aimed at the youth market”.

Music was the thread. Donovan was, in Edge’s words, an “ex-A&R bloke and dance music guru”, and for GTA2 he commissioned new tracks from Moving Shadow, a dance label, rather than licensing old ones. Rockstar’s PR manager, Brian Baglow, wrote a diary of the game’s making for Edge through 1999.

DMA Design and the studios

In September 1999 Take-Two bought DMA Design Holdings, the owner of DMA Design, for £1, and took on about $12.3 million of its debts. GTA2, published by Rockstar late that year, shipped more than a million copies by the end of October. Take-Two moved DMA from Dundee to Edinburgh, where it became Rockstar North in 2002; the DMA and Rockstar North entries tell that story.

Other studios followed and took the Rockstar name. Take-Two’s annual report for 2002 lists five: Rockstar North; Rockstar San Diego, formerly Angel Studios, maker of Midnight Club and Smuggler’s Run; Rockstar Toronto; Rockstar Vancouver, formerly Barking Dog Studios; and Rockstar Vienna, formerly Neo Software. Angel Studios cost $28.5 million in cash plus shares. In San Diego the studio finished Red Dead Revolver (2004), a western that Capcom had been due to publish until, Edge reported, it was shelved after a poor showing at E3 in 2002. Rockstar Toronto made The Warriors (2005), from the 1979 gang film. Rockstar Leeds made the PSP game Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (2005), and Rockstar Vancouver made Bully (2006). Wikipedia lists later studios in Lincoln, London, New England and India, and in 2020 Rockstar bought Ruffian Games and renamed it Rockstar Dundee, bringing the company back to the city where DMA started.

In December 1998 Take-Two had also taken the console rights to Max Payne, the game Remedy Entertainment was making in Finland, and in May 2002 it bought the series outright for $10 million and about 970,000 shares. Rockstar made Max Payne 3 (2012) itself.

Grand Theft Auto III and after

Grand Theft Auto III came out on the PlayStation 2 in October 2001 and was the best-selling game in the United States over the following year, according to Take-Two. Rockstar North followed it with Vice City (2002) and San Andreas (2004). By January 2005 Electronic Gaming Monthly was interviewing Donovan as Rockstar’s chief executive, with Sam Houser as president and Dan Houser as creative director.

Rockstar San Diego’s Red Dead Redemption (2010) took the western into an open world. Later games were made by all the studios together: Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) was developed across Rockstar’s studios, with Rockstar North among them. Take-Two reported in August 2026 that Grand Theft Auto V (2013) had sold more than 230 million copies and the series nearly 475 million, and that Red Dead Redemption 2 had passed 87 million. Grand Theft Auto VI is due on 19 November 2026.

Dan Houser, who had co-written the GTA and Red Dead games, left after a break that began in spring 2019; Take-Two announced that his last day would be 11 March 2020. Sam Houser remained president.

Controversy

Rockstar courted headlines from the start: BMG had hired the publicist Max Clifford to promote the first GTA, as the Grand Theft Auto entry describes. Some of the rows that followed were not planned.

  • Manhunt. In July 2004 the British retailers Dixons and Game withdrew Rockstar North’s Manhunt, a violent stealth game, after the parents of a murdered Leicester teenager blamed it for influencing his killer; the British Board of Film Classification stood by its 18 certificate. The Rockstar North entry gives the details.
  • Hot Coffee. In 2005 a modder, Patrick Wildenborg, found a sexual minigame, “Hot Coffee”, hidden in the code of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. After first deflecting questions, Rockstar acknowledged that the scenes were on the disc, Electronic Gaming Monthly reported, and the ESRB, the American ratings board, changed the game’s rating from Mature to Adults Only. Take-Two recorded $24.5 million in costs from returned copies. In June 2006 Take-Two and Rockstar settled Federal Trade Commission charges that they had failed to disclose the content, and agreed to disclose any content relevant to a rating on their games’ packaging and advertising. The ESRB entry covers the ratings side.
  • Bully. Bully drew criticism before it was released, and in Britain it was sold as Canis Canem Edit. Edge complained in November 2006 that much of the “pressure” came from people “open about the fact that they knew nothing about the game”.

Working conditions

In January 2010 an anonymous blog post signed by “Determined Devoted Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees” accused the studio of keeping staff on 12-hour days and six-day weeks since March 2009 while they made Red Dead Redemption, and of cutting benefits. Rockstar told its staff that it took working conditions “extremely seriously”, and denied cutting benefits. It later called the complaints “a case of people taking the opinions of a few anonymous posters on message boards as fact”.

In October 2018, shortly before Red Dead Redemption 2 came out, Dan Houser told New York magazine that “we were working 100-hour weeks” several times that year. After criticism he told Kotaku that he had meant the four senior writers, for about three weeks, and that “we obviously don’t expect anyone else to work this way”.

Rockstar’s relations with its staff were in the news again in 2025, when it dismissed 31 workers in Britain, all union members; the Rockstar North entry sets out both sides’ accounts and the tribunal ruling that followed. The same entry covers the lawsuit brought by Leslie Benzies, Rockstar North’s former president, which ended in a confidential settlement.

Sources

See also

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