GTA 6 studio Rockstar North, bought for 1 pound in 1999
Rockstar North builds Grand Theft Auto VI in Edinburgh. The studio started life as DMA Design with roughly two dozen staff, and Rob Nelson and Aaron Garbut run it today.
GTA6 LIFE
Rockstar North, the Edinburgh studio building Grand Theft Auto VI, was bought by Take-Two Interactive from Infogrames in 1999 for 1 pound. It was called DMA Design at the time. Rob Nelson, head of development, and Aaron Garbut run it today, and their game ships on November 19, 2026 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
David Jones founded DMA Design in Dundee in 1988. The studio put out the first Grand Theft Auto in November 1997 on MS-DOS and Windows, under the BMG Interactive label, and was bought that same year by Gremlin Interactive for 4.2 million pounds. Two years later it changed hands again for a single symbolic pound. The Rockstar Games label itself dates from December 1998, founded by Terry Donovan, Gary Foreman, Dan Houser, Sam Houser and Jamie King.
The current name came late. The studio left Dundee for Edinburgh in 2000, became Rockstar Studios in March 2002, then Rockstar North in May 2002, the week Vice City was announced at E3 on May 22. It works out of Barclay House on Holyrood Road, a building Rockstar bought in 2021.
No mainline game in the series had returned to Vice City since Vice City Stories, released on PSP on October 31, 2006. Twenty years.
How much the studio grew in between shows up in the team sizes quoted game by game.
| Game | Release | Team size quoted |
|---|---|---|
| GTA III | October 23, 2001 | about 23 people at DMA Design |
| Vice City | October 29, 2002 | 50 people, 18 months of development |
| San Andreas | October 26, 2004 | 75 people at Rockstar North |
| GTA V | September 17, 2013 | more than 1,000 across all Rockstar studios |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | October 26, 2018 | 1,600 to roughly 2,000 people |
Rockstar North on its own had about 22 employees in November 1992 and about 650 in 2018. The game by game breakdown sits in our history of the series.
Leadership has turned over three times in six years. Leslie Benzies, studio president and lead producer from GTA III to GTA V, went on sabbatical in September 2014 and left Rockstar in January 2016; he founded Build a Rocket Boy. Dan Houser, co-founder and the series’ principal writer, left on March 11, 2020. Michael Unsworth, vice president of writing, left in 2023 after sixteen years. Sam Houser remains president of Rockstar Games, and Jennifer Kolbe runs publishing.
Two studio heads, and a team assembled in Los Angeles
Aaron Garbut described how the interiors of GTA 6 were built to the New York Times, in remarks reported on August 28, 2026 by GamesIndustry.biz: “Every room in the game, somebody thought about this. Who’s sitting where, what they’re drinking, the marks that are left on the table. The pictures on the wall will have the people that are in that room, with their tattoos on their arms and their family behind them.”
Take-Two describes Rockstar Games as running ten internal studios. For GTA 6, a team of writers, directors and producers was assembled in Los Angeles to give individual direction to the people you pass in the street. The game carries 600,000 NPC animations against 300,000 in Red Dead Redemption 2 and 55,000 in GTA V, a gap we went looking for the origin of.
Rockstar has never published the list of studios that worked on GTA 6, nor the size of the project team. The only figure offered on August 28, 2026 is that its worldwide teams have “more than doubled” since Red Dead Redemption 2.
