Rockstar North (DMA Design)

The studio began life as DMA Design, founded in 1988 in Dundee, Scotland, by David Jones, who used redundancy money from the local Timex factory to buy an Amiga and start coding. DMA's name reportedly stood for nothing memorable, but its games did: the shoot-'em-ups Menace and Blood Money established it, and then in 1991 Lemmings - a puzzle game about guiding suicidal green-haired creatures to safety - became a colossal hit across every platform of the era.

DMA's second act reshaped the medium. In 1997 it released Grand Theft Auto, a chaotic top-down crime game whose open-city freedom and gleeful lawlessness drew both controversy and devotion. Through a period of ownership changes - passing through Gremlin Interactive and then French publisher Infogrames - the studio was ultimately acquired by Take-Two Interactive and folded into the newly formed Rockstar Games label.

In 2002 it was renamed Rockstar North, and under that banner it delivered the defining open-world franchise of its time. Grand Theft Auto III turned the series into a fully 3D living city; Vice City and San Andreas expanded it into pop-culture landmarks; and Grand Theft Auto IV and especially Grand Theft Auto V pushed sales into the hundreds of millions of copies, making GTA V one of the best-selling entertainment products ever created. The studio also crafted Red Dead Redemption alongside its sister teams.

Still based in Edinburgh, Rockstar North operates as the flagship development house of the Rockstar network, its lineage running unbroken from a Dundee bedroom to the most commercially successful games in history. Its founder David Jones had long since departed to start other ventures, but the studio he created remains at the center of the industry's biggest franchise.