Rockstar North

What Rockstar North is

Rockstar North is a game development studio based in Edinburgh, Scotland, and part of Rockstar Games. Its own site describes it as part of the Rockstar Games family since 1999 and gives 2002 as the year the studio took the Rockstar North name, with Rockstar Games named as its parent. The same page lists Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt among its products.

In our database the studio appears through Grand Theft Auto V. Rockstar's own announcement of that release credits the game to Rockstar North as the series' creator, which puts the studio on the development side of a title whose publishing and ownership sit with Rockstar Games and, above it, Take-Two Interactive. The studio's homepage and the corporate newswire are therefore two sources describing the same product from different positions in the company.

Edinburgh and the Rockstar group

The studio's own site is explicit about where it sits. It states that Rockstar North is based in Edinburgh, Scotland, that it has been part of the Rockstar Games family since 1999, that it was founded as Rockstar North in 2002, and that Rockstar Games is its parent. Those four statements are the company's own description of itself and they are the basis for how the studio is normally introduced.

The group structure behind them is visible in the legal notices attached to the studio's games. The PC store listing for Grand Theft Auto V carries a copyright line for Rockstar Games and names Rockstar North, Grand Theft Auto and the Rockstar marks as trademarks of Take-Two Interactive Software. Trademark ownership is not the same thing as development credit, but the two notices together show how the names divide up the work.

Grand Theft Auto V

Grand Theft Auto V was released worldwide on 17 September 2013 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The announcement on Rockstar's newswire says the game was developed by Rockstar North, described there as the series' creator, and highlights one of its structural changes: three playable lead characters whose stories interleave, with players able to switch between them inside the story.

Later versions of the game followed on other platforms, and the PC store listing documents that side of the release, including Grand Theft Auto Online, a first-person view mode and the Rockstar Editor video tools. Those are platform and publisher descriptions rather than studio statements, but they describe the same product from the distribution side and date the versions that followed the original release.

Reading the studio's credits

A recurring problem with a studio of this kind is telling apart the team that led a project from the many teams that contributed to it. Rockstar North's own page presents the studio through the Grand Theft Auto series without claiming every entry in it. Rockstar's newswire credits the studio as the developer of Grand Theft Auto V, and that is the specific claim the studio's site and the release announcement both support.

Where official material runs out is on numbers. Neither Rockstar North nor Rockstar Games publishes the studio's headcount, budgets or sales on the pages a reader can reach, and the studio's site is presented as a recruitment and portfolio page rather than a corporate report. Anything beyond the location, the ownership, the 2002 change of name and the games listed there has to come from somewhere else, and this profile does not include it.

Games

• Agent
• All New World of Lemmings
• Blood Money
• Body Harvest
• Christmas Lemmings
• Grand Theft Auto III
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Complete Edition
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced
• Grand Theft Auto: Director's Cut
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
• Hired Guns
• Hot Coffee
• Kid Kirby
• Lemmings 2: The Tribes
• Manhunt
• Space Station Silicon Valley
• Tanktics
• Uniracers
• Walker
• Wild Metal Country

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