Before Dundee made games, it made the computers people played them on. From 1981 the Timex factory in the city assembled Sinclair’s ZX81, and then the ZX Spectrum. One of its apprentices, David Jones, took voluntary redundancy, bought an Amiga and in 1988 set up DMA Design. DMA’s third game was Lemmings, and in 1997 it released Grand Theft Auto. Around DMA grew a university that taught people to make games, a student competition that brought teams to the city every summer, and a string of studios, several of them started by people who had worked at DMA.
Fast facts
- Where: Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland.
- Factory: Timex, which assembled Sinclair computers from 1981 and closed in 1993.
- Studio that started it: DMA Design, founded by David Jones in 1988.
- Best-known games: Lemmings (1991) and Grand Theft Auto (1997).
- University: Abertay, which advertises its games degree as the world’s first.
- Later studios: Realtime Worlds, Ruffian Games (now Rockstar Dundee), 4J Studios, Denki, Outplay, Ninja Kiwi Europe.
The Timex factory
Sinclair Research designed its computers but did not build them. When the ZX81 came out in March 1981, Sinclair gave its assembly to Timex, which had made mechanical watches in Dundee and had little experience of electronics. Sinclair User visited in May 1982 and found production of the ZX81 had risen from 10,000 to 80,000 a month, with Sinclair’s printer running at 15,000 a month in the same factory. When the Spectrum arrived, Timex built that too: in December 1982 Sinclair User reported that Timex and a second contractor, Thorn-EMI, were making 30,000 Spectrums a month between them, and by April 1983 two articulated lorries a day were carrying Spectrums, ZX81s and printers from Dundee to Camberley in Surrey, where Sinclair’s goods passed through on their way to customers. The factory’s problems became Sinclair’s. A strike in the winter of 1982–83 cost seven days’ production, and in March 1984 Sinclair User explained Sinclair’s pre-tax profit rising by only £600,000 partly by “the supply problems at Timex in Dundee”. After Amstrad bought the Spectrum, it agreed in 1986 that Timex in Dundee would build at least 100,000 of the new Spectrum +2.
The factory closed in October 1993 after a bitter dispute. In 1994, when Commodore UK’s managers were looking for somewhere to restart Amiga production, Amiga Format reported that “the defunct Timex plant in Dundee” was a candidate.
David Jones joined Timex as an apprentice. “I was really lucky because where I lived in Dundee, Timex was the manufacturer of Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 computers,” he said in 2018. He had built a ZX81 from a kit, and at Timex he worked on the machines, their tape drives and the ZX Microdrive. When the factory ran into trouble he took voluntary redundancy and spent the money on an Amiga.
DMA Design
Jones went to study at what is now Abertay University. “I had my second game published when I was in the third year of my degree at the University of Abertay,” he told Edge in 1998. “I left to form DMA with the option to return to finish my degree if I wanted.” Someone who later helped run Abertay’s games course told him that was “mad”.
DMA’s first game, Menace, was a shoot-’em-up for Psyclapse, a label of the Liverpool publisher Psygnosis, advertised in October 1988. Blood Money followed in 1989. When RAZE sent a reporter to Dundee in November 1990 to see “the guys behind Menace and Blood Money”, Jones had decided to “develop his own company … bring in outside programmers, and expand his offices in Dundee”. RAZE added that “it will come as no surprise that Dave Jones’s background lies on the Spectrum”.
Lemmings came out early in 1991. The One gave it 96%, and by January 1992 Amiga Format reported sales of more than 365,000 copies across all formats. By 1997 Edge was counting 21 formats and 20 million copies, a figure that probably includes the sequels and every conversion. The Lemmings entry sets out the sales claims and who reported them.
When Edge visited in January 1997, DMA was in the Dundee Technology Park, with nine new cars in the car park, and was writing Grand Theft Auto for BMG. The game came out late that year. Gremlin bought DMA in 1997, Infogrames bought Gremlin in 1999, and Take-Two bought DMA at the end of 1999 and moved it to Edinburgh, where most of the staff left. In 2002 the studio became Rockstar North, and it has made the Grand Theft Auto series from Edinburgh ever since. The DMA Design entry tells that story in full.
Abertay and Dare to be Digital
In 1998 Edge surveyed the first British university courses in making games. It named the University of Abertay in Dundee, with its BSc (Hons) in Games Technology and Virtual Environments, as one of the institutions leading the field, and noted Abertay’s “close relationship” with DMA. Jones said DMA had “about 15 graduates from the University of Abertay”. N64 Magazine that summer called Abertay “the first to offer a BSc in Computer Games Technology and Virtual Environments”. Abertay itself goes further: its advertising in Edge in 2013 said it had “launched the world’s first Computer Games degree”, and the university dates that degree to 1997. No independent study settles the claim.
Abertay also ran Dare to be Digital, a summer competition held every year from 1999 in which student teams came to Dundee to design, prototype and test a game in a few weeks, with industry mentors watching. Edge followed the 2009 winners: fourteen teams of five took part, three won, and the games were shown to the public at the ProtoPlay event during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Realtime Worlds
In February 2000 Jones joined Rage Software to set up new studios, and Rage’s Dundee studio worked on a game called CarWars. When Rage shrank in 2002, Jones bought the studio out with the help of the Psygnosis co-founder Ian Hetherington, and Realtime Worlds was born, with a core of 15 staff from DMA. CarWars became Crackdown, an open-city action game for the Xbox 360, released in February 2007. It sold more than 1.6 million copies, according to Edge.
Realtime Worlds’ next game was APB: All Points Bulletin, an online multiplayer game. The company raised more than $100 million and grew to more than 200 staff. APB came out in 2010 to “tepid sales and even cooler reviews”, as Edge put it, and on 17 August 2010, six weeks after launch, Realtime Worlds went into administration. Edge reported that 200 developers lost their jobs.
After Realtime Worlds
Some of the contractors Microsoft had brought in to finish Crackdown formed Ruffian Games in Dundee, and Ruffian made Crackdown 2. In 2020 Rockstar bought Ruffian and renamed it Rockstar Dundee, bringing the Grand Theft Auto company back to the city where DMA began.
Other studios followed:
- 4J Studios converted games for consoles. In 2010 Edge followed its remake of Rare’s Perfect Dark for Xbox Live Arcade, and the studio later made the console editions of Minecraft.
- Denki, where Gary Penn, who had worked on Grand Theft Auto at BMG and DMA, was making games by 2004.
- Outplay Entertainment, a mobile games studio set up in 2011 by the brothers Richard and Douglas Hare. Douglas Hare said they chose Dundee because “there were really very few places in the world that had experience doing social network games or mobile games, both of which were being done in Dundee.”
- Ninja Kiwi Europe, the New Zealand company Ninja Kiwi’s Dundee studio. It began as Digital Goldfish, which had made mobile versions of Ninja Kiwi’s Bloons games before Ninja Kiwi bought it in 2012.
In 2019 the V&A’s exhibition Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt came to the new V&A Dundee, from 20 April to 8 September, supported by Abertay University among others.
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 2, May 1982: the Timex factory in Dundee (its background in mechanical watches; ZX81 production from 10,000 to 80,000 a month; the printer).
- Sinclair User issue 9, December 1982: Timex and Thorn-EMI making 30,000 Spectrums a month.
- Sinclair User issue 10, January 1983: strike at Timex in Dundee.
- Sinclair User issue 13, April 1983: lorries from Dundee to Camberley.
- Sinclair User issue 24, March 1984: “supply problems at Timex in Dundee”.
- Sinclair User issue 52, July 1986: Amstrad’s agreement with Timex in Dundee to build at least 100,000 Spectrum +2s.
- Amiga Format issue 63, September 1994: “the defunct Timex plant in Dundee”, closed in October 1993 after a dispute.
- Dean Takahashi, “Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones: You never know when you’ve got a hit idea”, GamesBeat, 9 July 2018: Jones on Timex (web, secondary).
- ACE issue 13, October 1988: Psyclapse advertisement for Menace.
- RAZE issue 1, November 1990: visit to DMA Design.
- The One issue 28, January 1991: Lemmings review (96%).
- Amiga Format issue 30, January 1992: Lemmings sales.
- Edge issue 41, January 1997, pp. 52–58: DMA Design studio visit (20 million copies across 21 formats).
- Edge issue 58, May 1998: university games courses (Abertay; DMA; Jones on his degree and DMA’s Abertay graduates).
- N64 Magazine issue 17, July 1998: Abertay “the first to offer a BSc in Computer Games Technology and Virtual Environments”.
- PC Zone issue 83, December 1999: Take-Two buys DMA Design. Edge issue 105, Christmas 2001: the move to Edinburgh.
- Edge issue 94, February 2001: Jones joins Rage, February 2000.
- Edge issue 143, December 2004: Gary Penn at Denki.
- Edge issue 211, February 2010: Realtime Worlds “founded by Dave Jones in 2002, with a core of 15 staff from his previous studio, DMA Design”.
- Edge issue 212, March 2010: Dare to be Digital (every year since 1999; the 2009 competition; ProtoPlay); 4J Studios and Perfect Dark.
- Edge issue 223, January 2011: APB’s “tepid sales and even cooler reviews”.
- Edge issue 220, November 2010: “Realtime damage” (Rage’s Dundee studio; the buyout; Crackdown’s release and sales; APB; administration on 17 August 2010; the contractors who formed Ruffian).
- Edge issue 255, July 2013, pp. 198–199: University of Abertay advertisement (“the world’s first Computer Games degree”).
- “Ruffian Games is now Rockstar Dundee”, Game Informer, 12 October 2020 (web, secondary).
- “4J Studios” and “Denki”, Wikipedia: both studios based in Dundee; 4J’s console editions of Minecraft (web, secondary).
- Abertay University, “20 Years of Games”, abertay.ac.uk: the 1997 date (web, secondary).
- Scottish Development International, “Outplay” case study, sdi.co.uk: the founders, 2011, Douglas Hare’s quote (web, secondary).
- “Scottish studio Digital Goldfish bagged by Ninja Kiwi”, PocketGamer.biz, November 2012 (web, secondary).
- V&A Dundee, Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition page, vam.ac.uk: dates and supporters (web, secondary).