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Inside DMA Design (AKA: Rockstar Games) In 1996

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From Lemmings to Larceny — DMA Design’s leap into gaming infamy started right here.

Ah, the 90s – that unmistakable era of questionable fashion choices, dial-up internet, and frosted tips! But one thing that wasn’t shocking? The creative brilliance bubbling away at DMA Design (yes, the very same studio behind Lemmings).

A recently resurfaced 1996 video shows the Dundee-based team hard at work on a brand-new project titled Grand Theft Auto. What began as a quirky top-down car game called Race’n’Chase would soon explode into one of the most iconic (and controversial) video game franchises of all time.

The footage offers a fascinating glimpse into gaming history – you can spot early builds of Liberty City, rough animations, and plenty of mid-’90s office vibes. It’s surreal seeing the team at DMA Design – later to be renamed Rockstar North, part of Rockstar Games, laying the groundwork for what would redefine open-world gaming forever.

So throw on your flannel shirt, fire up your CRT monitor, and take a nostalgic trip back to where it all began – before Grand Theft Auto became a global phenomenon, it was just a bunch of Scots tinkering with pixels and possibilities.

🎥 Watch the 1996 development video and witness gaming history in motion!


source: BBC Archive

Grand Theft Auto VI’s Second Trailer

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By: D.C. Cutler, U.S.A.

I’m an enormous fan of the “Grand Theft Auto” franchise and I’m looking forward to the release of “GTA VI,” but I must be honest…I wasn’t that impressed by the newest “GTA VI” trailer that was released a month ago.

There are some on the internet who have some absurd conspiracy theories about what happens in the next installment of “GTA.” I’ve heard one about car keys that made me laugh. I was told one about the pregnant woman that appears in the trailer that was absolutely ridiculous. “GTA VI” is the biggest video game in the world. Predictions and theories are going to be all over the map, but some are senseless.

I think there will be a lot more role-playing mechanics added to the game from the previous versions. There were 31 million views of the second trailer in 8 hours. Rockstar released it on a random Tuesday to please curious fans. I like the first trailer for “GTA VI” more. The use of music in “GTA” trailers has been terrific, especially for “Vice City” with “I Ran” by the band A Flock of Seagulls. That trailer for “Vice City” made me want to play that game the moment I watched it.


source: Rockstar Games

The visuals look amazing in the new trailer. The details of what characters are wearing look incredible. There’s a moment in a club where our principal characters (perhaps) dance and it looks like a scene out of a film. I paused the trailer and watched that moment again. The shiny, party dress that our lead female protagonist is wearing looks so real.

I don’t think any gaming company has ever had a more ace-in-the-hole than Rockstar has with the “GTA VI” release. Maybe in all of entertainment. Everyone knew Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” would be a smash hit. “GTA VI” has that level of anticipation for a piece of entertainment.

 

Lessons A Huge AAA Success Like GTA 5 Can Teach Indie Developers

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Grand Theft Auto 5, Rockstar Games’ colossal juggernaut of a title, was developed on a budget of $265 million. The end product was a detailed open-world game with cutting edge graphics and AI programming of unparalleled complexity (for the time).

All that is just about as distant as you can get from indie game development.

Rockstar has decades of industry experience, GTA is one of the most popular mainstream AAA franchises around and the company spent more than half of its hundreds-of-millions budget on marketing. It also just cracked over 95 million copies sold.

Anyone with an inkling of what indie development looks like will know that these things are worlds apart.

And yet, in the underlying fabric of the game itself – not the product – are lessons that small teams working remotely and one-man devs can learn from, if only conceptually. Development of a title like GTA 5 is a unique beast in terms of project management, and unlike anything most AAA developers have to deal with let alone indies, so we’ll be focusing on just the game itself.

It’s also a tough example because, due to its high budget, there was very little the developers couldn’t allow themselves. Even so, interviews and other sources have revealed that over the course of the game’s development a number of features and mechanics were cut either due to time or monetary constraints.

This brings us to our first lesson, and one that can be applied to gaming universally – scope. You need to know the scope of what you want to do, what you can get done, and sync the two together. Game development can be arduous work even when the crunch hasn’t set in, and indie developers are certainly hit harder than AAA in this regard.

In the case of indie devs, when they’re working from a much smaller budget or are developing for free, the stress of getting your title out into the open can be confounded with making that title the best it can be. Feature-creep must be avoided, cut what needs to be cut and stay focused on your scope.

Too many indie developers give up their daily lives to create their first game, release it, then patch it profusely only to end up with health issues, broken relationships and a financially unsuccessful game because they lost sight of what could be feasibly achieved.

Big productions like GTA 5 have specific committees to keep an eye out for this, reining in the project if too many features are planned, pushing the limits of deadlines and budgets.

On the other hand, indie developers have more control over their work and need to be their own supervisors. If GTA 5 had stretched itself too thin because adding additional feature X and Y would be “cool”, it wouldn’t be the critically acclaimed success it is today.

Another thing GTA 5 gets right is the ratio of content to scale. AAA titles these days pride themselves on how expansive their maps are and how much sheer content there is – you’d think that more is universally better. Thing is, even though the settings of Los Santos and Blaine County are large, together, they’re hardly the largest open world in gaming.

Instead, Rockstar knew to limit the physical size of the map to the amount of content they’d produce. Thus, GTA 5 has a large amount of unique content distributed evenly and organically throughout the action-space. Things aren’t too cramped nor are they too far between.

Relating gameplay content with map size is very specific to open-world sandboxes, but the principle can be applied to any game. The pacing, amount and length of content needs to be in balance.

There is no golden ratio and that “balance” varies depending on the project. Maybe a sombre exploration game is well balanced when quiet moments are predominant, where an action-packed FPS is well balanced when you keep the adrenaline pumping.

Generally, as an indie developer, realistic goals are essential, and no-one should be gunning for a spectacle the scope and size of GTA 5 right off the bat. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from the game and how it implements basic game design principles, because these principles are universal and GTA 5 implements them masterfully.

image source: Rockstar Games

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Logan Smith
Logan has been obsessed with Rockstar Games ever since the Grand Theft Auto series went 3D with GTA III. He spends his time wandering Los Santos while eagerly waiting for Red Dead Redemption 2 to finally land.