Rockstar North

And so what about the studio itself? So Dave wanted to call the studio Acme Software, but that name was already taken.

So eventually they settled for DMA Design.

And DMA stands for Direct Memory Access, which is a little inspiration from something he read in his Amiga instruction manual.

But later, the guys behind DMA, they also cheekily sometimes say it stands for doesn't mean anything just to confuse everybody.

The game turned Dave into a millionaire by the time he was 25, 26 years old.

So yeah, well done.

So by November 1992, DMA Design had grown to 22 staff members and relocated to a more proper office.

Because how will you fit 22 people into two tiny rooms in this, you know, makeshift office basically, right?

This feels like, I don't know, like they had a whole different vision and it just feels completely unique.

despite having two and a half games before it you know i mean it's got its own vibe it's got its own aesthetic it's got its own sort of it felt like to me that this was like a rebirth of i don't know did dma design as a as a studio or

yeah

as a or as a series it definitely felt like it was more than just you know the third one in a series it definitely felt like it was sort of brand new seed that was planted and a new sort of gta tree was sprouting alongside and vastly you know superior superiorly took over the other two it was um yeah its own beast so to speak yeah i

Makes me think of living at home with my parents and all of the childhood friends I haven't seen for so many years and naturally lost contact with.

The first game I completed and one of the few games I have genuine emotional attachment to.

So, as Darren mentioned, developed by DMA Design and published by Rockstar Games.

This was the first game that Rockstar Games published, and DMA Design would then later go on to be known as Rockstar Games.

Now, the thing is, it wasn't real.

And I didn't know this bit, and this was hilarious, right? So former Rockstar North technical director, Obi Vermage, later explained that players who thought they were hearing Bigfoot might have actually been hearing CJ's stomach rumbling.

Because there was a sound

effect.

City.

Grand Theft Auto Vice City came out in 2002 from Rockstar North.

It was published by Rockstar Games and it was a PlayStation 2 exclusive.

Wow.

and if in five years time I will be walking around a zoo with video players looking down over me and you I won't be very happy about that whatsoever our next story though regards GTA 6 which as of yesterday at least when I record this is is one month away from launching which is absolutely mad I still kind of can't fathom that this game is not going to get delayed again and it is real and we will be playing it sooner rather than later But yeah, all of these tidbits come by the way of Jason Schreier, who recently published a big deep dive into the development of the game over on Bloomberg, and has been publishing follow-up YouTube videos on his personal channel, where he also talks about some of the tidbits, still interesting tidbits that didn't make it into that piece, that we're definitely going to get to today, but...

He flew over to Rockstar North and interviewed some of the top developers as he described it and talked quite candidly about the development of the game and the issues that the sequel had, especially towards the start of development and kind of just what they've been doing for the past eight years.

Closer to 13 years, if you want to talk about the very immediate pre-production of the game, which happened pretty soon after Grand Theft Auto V shipped.

But, yeah.

No.

Originally, Rockstar was Rockstar North, so I will say it's north of the equator, so you can scale it down a little

bit.

Russia? No.