DMA Design

History

DMA Design's origin rests on a single redundancy check. In 1987, David Jones — born in Dundee in October 1965 — was made redundant from his factory job at the Timex plant. He used his severance pay to buy an Amiga 1000 computer. With that machine and three former classmates from the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club — Mike Dailly, Russell Kay, and Steve Hammond — Jones formed what would initially be called Acme Software in 1984, later renamed DMA Design in 1987. The abbreviation 'DMA' stood for 'direct memory access' in Amiga manuals, though Jones would later claim it stood for 'Doesn't Mean Anything.' The company began in a single apartment room in Dundee, developing the side-scrolling shooter Menace. Released in 1988 and published by Psygnosis, Menace sold 15,000 copies and earned Jones £20,000 — enough to buy a car and finance the next project.

The next project would define the studio's reputation for a decade. In 1991, DMA Design released Lemmings, a puzzle game in which players guided groups of small creatures across hazardous levels by assigning them specific tasks — digging, building, blocking — to reach an exit. The game sold 55,000 copies on the Amiga on its first day alone, an extraordinary figure for any title of the era. Over the following years, Lemmings was ported to more than twenty platforms. Mike Dailly estimated that between 1991 and 2006, the game sold approximately 15 million copies across all versions; other sources placed the cumulative total above 20 million. DMA Design rapidly expanded after Lemmings' release, moving from Jones's apartment into proper office space and growing from a handful of people to a full studio. The company released several Lemmings sequels and expansions through the mid-1990s before parting with Psygnosis in 1994.

By the mid-1990s DMA Design faced financial pressure despite its earlier success. The studio had begun multiple projects with Nintendo and BMG Interactive, many of which stalled or were cancelled. In March 1995, the company started work on a top-down driving game originally titled Race 'n' Chase, running on Mike Dailly's 'Legovision' engine — a bird's-eye view system that rendered three cities inspired by American metropolises (Liberty City, San Andreas, Vice City) and offered modes blending racing, demolition, and heists in which players could choose to play as cop or robber. The design was unconventional and struggled to find a publisher. In April 1997, financially stricken, David Jones sold DMA Design to the UK publisher Gremlin Interactive for £4.2 million.

The acquisition by Gremlin did not bring stability. Gremlin's own finances deteriorated after the poor sales of DMA's 1998 Nintendo 64 title Body Harvest, and by March 1999 Gremlin was itself taken over by the French publisher Infogrames for £24 million. That same year, the driving game project — now titled Grand Theft Auto — was published by BMG Interactive. Despite mixed critical reception, the game sold well enough to attract attention from Take-Two Interactive, which formed Rockstar Games in 1998 specifically to manage the franchise. Infogrames, more conservative in its publishing strategy and uninterested in Grand Theft Auto's adult content, was willing to divest. In September 1999, Take-Two Interactive bought DMA Design from Infogrames for the nominal price of £1 while assuming US$12.3 million in debt.

Under Take-Two and Rockstar Games, DMA Design entered a period of sustained productivity. The studio developed Grand Theft Auto 2 (1999) and then began work on the franchise's first fully three-dimensional entry, Grand Theft Auto III (2001). GTA III transformed the series from a niche cult title into a cultural phenomenon, selling over 14.5 million copies worldwide and establishing the template for the open-world action genre that would dominate the medium for the following two decades. Following the game's success, DMA Design was formally renamed Rockstar North in 2002. David Jones, Mike Dailly, Russell Kay, and Steve Hammond — the four co-founders who had started the company in a Dundee apartment — had all departed by the late 1990s. The studio that bore their names was gone, but the two franchises they created — one about guiding creatures to safety, the other about stealing cars and evading police — had each reshaped the medium in ways the founders could not have anticipated when they bought that first Amiga in 1987.