DMA Design

DMA Design was a Scottish studio from Dundee that managed to come up with two utterly different yet equally groundbreaking ideas — the puzzle game Lemmings and the open-world crime game Grand Theft Auto. While Lemmings, in which tiny green-haired creatures had to be saved from certain doom using a set of simple commands, became a phenomenon ported to virtually every platform of the early nineties, Grand Theft Auto a few years later sparked one of the biggest controversies in video game history while laying the foundation for one of the most commercially successful gaming franchises of all time. DMA Design itself later evolved into Rockstar North, the studio that still develops GTA today.

History

DMA Design was founded in Dundee, Scotland, in the second half of the 1980s, initially focusing on games for home computers such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga. True worldwide success came only with Lemmings (1991) — a game in which the player doesn't control a single character but a horde of tiny creatures marching toward doom, who must be assigned tasks like digging, building, or blocking their path in order to reach safety. The game became one of the biggest hits of its era and was ported to almost everything that existed at the time — from the Amiga and DOS through the Sega Mega Drive and Sega Master System to the CD-i console — finding its own audience on every platform.

After the success of Lemmings, DMA Design moved on to more experimental projects before releasing, in 1997, a game that made the studio famous in a completely different way — Grand Theft Auto. The top-down view, an open city, and the ability to play as a criminal sparked a wave of moral panic in the media and among politicians, which, paradoxically, only added to the game's popularity. The sequel Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999) developed the concept further and moved it to a fictional futuristic city. During this period the studio was acquired by the American publisher Take-Two Interactive, which saw enormous commercial potential in DMA Design. The real turning point came with Grand Theft Auto III (2001) on the PlayStation 2 — by moving to a fully three-dimensional open world, the game defined the genre for the next two decades and propelled both the series and the entire studio into the most prominent names in the games industry. In 2002, DMA Design was renamed Rockstar North and became the core of the Rockstar Games publishing label.

Key People

The studio was founded by David Jones, a programmer and designer who also stood behind the original concept of Lemmings and was one of the people who turned DMA Design from a small Scottish team into a name with worldwide reach. Jones left the company back in the 1990s, before the renaming to Rockstar North, and founded his own development studio, where he continued making games outside of Take-Two's umbrella. After his departure, creative leadership was taken over by other longtime team members who had been present at the birth of Grand Theft Auto and who steered the studio through the turbulent late nineties all the way to the renaming as Rockstar North, under which the company still operates today.

Today

The former DMA Design now operates as Rockstar North, one of the key studios of the Rockstar Games publishing label, and remains the principal architect of the Grand Theft Auto series as well as other major projects from the company. The original DMA Design name may have disappeared from game boxes as early as the early 2000s, but its legacy lives on in every new GTA installment and in the very DNA of the studio, which is still based in Scotland. Meanwhile, the Lemmings brand has passed to other owners and returns to new players mainly through occasional remakes and mobile versions, while the name DMA Design remains just a historical chapter in the family tree of one of the most influential game studios of today.