Inside Rockstar North - Backup

In 1999 two teams moved from Dundee (dma-design) to Edinburgh. The team that had made Space Station Silicon Valley went on to make gta3. The team that previously made 'Body Harvest' for the Nintendo 64 went on to work on Manhunt. I was not directly involved with the game until the very end but here are some observations: The design was mostly done by the team itself. The dark undertone was there from the start. Initially there were some very ambitious ideas for the AI. The hunters were to be organized in groups of 4. The hunters would have a leader (sergeant) and the leaders would communicate with each other. The player would have a radio and be able to follow the conversations. If a hunter spotted the player, or something out-of-place, he would report this to his superior. Then the superior would make a decision on the course of action and give orders to his men as well as inform the other hunter groups. The AI could, for example, do a sweep of the room where the player wa...

I joined the company (then dma-design) in 1995. I worked on a game called 'Space Station Silicon Valley' (SV) for the Nintendo 64. At the time we worked in a larger open office that housed 4 teams. SV, Tanktics, the test department and Gta. The company was very open, there was even a thing called Friday afternoon R&D where you were encouraged to talk to other teams to cross pollinate ideas. So I was able to follow the development of gta1&2 fairly closely. By the time I got there, the game had already gone through a number of changes. The game originally started from a tech demo made by Mike Dailly. It was a top down view with 3d buildings on top. This was before 3D cards and it was hard to get 3D to run at a decent frame rate. Mike's demo used code similar to Doom to draw the 3D effect. The downside of this code was that the camera could not tilt. The upside was that the game ran on a pc without hardware acceleration at a good frame rate. The team took this engi...

There was a 6 weeks gap between finishing gta3 and the release. This was needed for burning the cd and distribution. In those days you couldn't patch so there was no point hanging around. The company gave the team some time off and most people took some extra time also. After the release, we started on Vice City. It was RockStar New York's idea to set the game in the 80s in Miami. Originally it was supposed to be a mission pack to gta3. Only once gta3 did as well as it did and Vice City started to look sufficiently different from gta3 was the decision made to make it a standalone game. This was quite far into the project. (maybe 6 months or so) We did the PC conversion of gta3 ourselves. This took the programmers about 6 months. In the mean time the artists and level designers were able to get straight onto Vice City. This worked well as there aren't that many code changes from gta3 to Vice whereas it did involve building a whole new city and new missions. The artists and...

The first prototype of gta3 ran on a Dreamcast. We all had Dreamcasts and all played Phantasy Star Online. This didn't last long as the Dreamcast lost out to Playstation 2 and we switched. Rockstar New York had only just been founded. As the people in New York had to get set up and get to grips with a lot of games, they hadn't given us any projects to work on. We had started on gta3 because that seemed like a good idea. It wasn't until months later they gave us the green light. R*NY were pretty hands off during gta3. They managed the voice actors and did all the commercial stuff. They made suggestions though and towards the end they were involved with Quality Control. Our team was made up of the core of the Space Station Silicon Valley team in addition to new hires. Only 2 people on Gta3 were also on the original games (Ian McQue and Alan Campbell) The game took 2.5 years to develop. Even with games being a lot less complicated in those days, that's still pretty q...

During gta3 the game was buggy during most of its development. This happened because we started the game from scratch and also used a new rendering engine (RenderWare) that was also not all that mature at the time. Through most of development, it was rare to play through a mission without a crash happening. The frame rate was below 10 for most of the time and the map was full of holes. Later we developed a bug database but during gta3, the testers would simply print out every bug. Every programmer, level designer and artist had a physical pile of sheets on their desk. If you felt the bug was more easily fixed by someone else you would simply put it on that persons pile. The collision in a game is usually different from the visual polygons. This is because collision detection is relatively slow. A building with 10,000 visual polygons may have only 1,000 collision polygons. As a consequence, the map may have holes that you cannot see. This is what's going on when you fall through ...

Between when I joined dma-design in 1995 and 1999 there were several titles in development. Gta & gta2 Body Harvest for the N64 Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 Tanktics Covert which became Wild Metal Country Attack which was canceled Clanwars which was canceled In 1999 the company went through a series of changes. It had been sold to Gremlin earlier. Gremlin sold dma-design to BMG. BMG sold dma-design to Take2-Interactive. Take2 set up the label 'Rockstar Games' and place dma-design underneath it. Dma-design (based in Dundee, Scotland) opened a satellite studio in Edinburgh. Members of two teams that had just finished their games (Body Harvest and Silicon Valley) were given the option to move to Edinburgh. The majority went. Months later the main office in Dundee was closed altogether. At this point there were 2 teams sitting in Edinburgh but no projects to work on. There wasn't much in terms of direction from Rockstar New York so everybody starte...