Games - Rockstar North

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	Games - Rockstar North

Rockstar North (formerly DMA Design) is a developer of computer and video games, formerly based in Dundee, Scotland, and now located in the heart of Edinburgh. It is the primary developer of the Grand Theft Auto
series, including Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which are three of the best-selling games of this console generation; in its earlier guise as DMA, it was responsible for originating the monumentally successful Lemmings franchise.

History

Formation

Founded by Dave Jones, the name DMA was originally taken from the Amiga programming manuals simply because it sounded cool and did not actually mean anything. The initials were later 'retrofitted' so that they briefly stood for Direct Mind Access, a play on the computer term Direct Memory Access, before finally standing for Doesn't Mean Anything, thus making official the playful notion that they were indeed meaningless.

DMA scored two early successes with Menace and Blood Money -- side-scrolling space shooters which gained some attention from gamers and critics for both their high-quality presentation and punishing level of difficulty. As with all the company's early games, Menace and Blood Money debuted on the Amiga, with DOS ports coming later.

Early 1990s: Lemmings, Body Harvest and Grand Theft Auto

DMA's major breakthrough came with 1990's Lemmings, a deviously simple puzzle game that went on to sell over 20 million copies on 21 different systems (ranging from major platforms like the NES and Macintosh to such relatively obscure formats as the FM Towns and the Philips CD-i). Much of DMA's time over the next few years was devoted to Lemmings follow-ups (Oh No! More Lemmings, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, All New World of Lemmings, and two Christmas-themed Holiday Lemmings special editions), although they did manage to release two original titles: 1993's Walker (a coolly received side-scrolling mech shooter) and 1994's Hired Guns (an innovative first-person strategy game with a four-way split screen). Other Lemmings sequels and spinoffs, such as Lemmings Paintball and Lemmings 3D, have appeared over the years, but these were produced without DMA's involvement.

1994's Uniracers, an odd 2D racer featuring disembodied unicycles with a heavy emphasis on stunts, was the company's first game to debut on a console (the Super Nintendo). Published by Nintendo, it also marked DMA's first game without Psygnosis -- their publisher since Menace -- and the beginning of what would be a long and often bumpy relationship with the Japanese console giant.

After spending some time experimenting with various next-generation consoles (particularly the 3DO), DMA was asked by Nintendo to join their "Dream Team" of developers for the upcoming Ultra 64 system (later renamed Nintendo 64), alongside such other developers as Rare, Paradigm, Midway Games, and LucasArts. Under this arrangement, DMA would produce an N64-exclusive title that Nintendo would publish. The result of this collaboration was Body Harvest, a third-person 3D vehicular action game with a decidedly un-Nintendo storyline about aliens arriving on Earth at various points in history to harvest mankind for food. However, whereas Psygnosis took a hands-off approach towards its outside developers, Nintendo was far more demanding, requiring a number of major overhauls to the original design (most notably the addition of puzzle and role-playing elements, intended to make the game more appealing to the Japanese market). The game underwent numerous delays, and Nintendo finally decided to drop their publishing plans. Midway picked up the rights and finally released it in 1998 -- nearly three years after the game was first shown at the N64's Japanese unveiling. Reaction was mostly favourable, although more than a few gamers criticized the decidedly sub-par graphics (no doubt a result of the inordinately long production schedule).

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