The Edinburgh studio that leads development of the Grand Theft Auto series for Rockstar Games.
Rockstar North is a Scottish video game studio based in Edinburgh. It is best known as the lead developer of the Grand Theft Auto series, one of the biggest entertainment franchises ever made. It designs the game worlds, the gameplay and the stories, and it also worked on titles such as Manhunt and parts of Red Dead Redemption 2 and Max Payne 3. Grand Theft Auto V has sold close to 200 million copies, and a local newspaper describes the studio as the beating heart of the GTA franchise. The same article counts 16 main games in the series, including expansions and handheld entries, and says the studio leads the franchise while sister studios take on specialist work.
The studio began as DMA Design, founded in Dundee in 1988 by David Jones. Its first big hit was the puzzle game Lemmings in 1991, and the first top-down Grand Theft Auto followed in 1997. Take-Two Interactive bought the studio in 1999, and it became part of Rockstar Games, the publishing label, taking the name Rockstar North in 2002. We did not find a short mission statement from the studio itself, so we have not put words in its mouth.
Rockstar North has been in Edinburgh for over 20 years. It moved to Greenside Row in 2004 and to Barclay House on Holyrood Road, near the Scottish Parliament, in 2014, and it later bought that building. Reports say about 650 people worked there by 2018, with hundreds more across the wider Rockstar network. Sister studios in the UK include Rockstar Leeds and Rockstar Lincoln, which have supported ports, mobile work and testing, alongside Rockstar studios overseas.
The people at Rockstar North include coders, audio programmers, animators, artists, web developers and software engineers. Some long-serving leaders have grown up inside the studio: Aaron Garbut joined in 1996 and Andrew Semple in 2001, and today Semple is studio director with Garbut and Rob Nelson as co-studio heads. Rockstar is known for being private and for working on very large projects, so it is worth asking what daily life is like in the team you are applying to join. Rockstar's other UK sites, Leeds and Lincoln, show there are routes into the group outside Edinburgh too, for example in testing and quality assurance.
If you like games, the studio shows how many kinds of work sit behind one title. Programmers build the engine and game systems, artists and animators create the cities and characters, audio teams build the sound, and quality and production staff keep huge projects on track. Maths, computer science, art and design, music and writing can all lead here. Rockstar North's origins show how small beginnings can grow: in 1992 the studio had 22 staff, by 1997 about 100, and during Grand Theft Auto V development about 360. Rockstar's own site lists current vacancies by team, so that is the best place to see which skills it is looking for.
Website: www.rockstargames.com
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