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Before Rockstar Games. The Complete History of DMA Design.

Hello guys. Briefly: I wish you a cozy atmosphere and other food and tea at the monitor when you read this topic.

Today Rockstar is a huge and close-knit team of developers and publishers, which has given the world many signature and universally recognizable titles. The formation of more than one generation of people is associated with the games of these developers. The company’s current status, led by brothers Sam and Dan Houser, is a benchmark of hard-won success.

However, speaking about the successful position of Rockstar in our time, one cannot help but look back, because any story always has a beginning.
Rockstar wasn’t always called what it is today. Initially, the company produced products under a different name – DMA Design.

Forward to the past. DMA Design.

So it’s 1984. These are times when people had not yet crushed each other both in cars, making excuses for seeing this in Grand Theft Auto, and in the queues of stores, rushing to be the first to purchase the same Grand Theft Auto. Then one young Scottish guy, David Jones, visited an amateur computer club with his friends and part-time future members of DMA Design "KACC" (from English. Kingsway Amateur Computer Club), in which they often discussed computer games for then-current platforms, for example, such as ZX Spectrum, on assembly of which at the factory Timex the guy earned his living.

David Jones. Founder and leader DMA Design

But, in addition to lamp conversations, Jones dreamed of developing his own game. A short time later, Timex says goodbye to David due to staff reductions, after which he, having a sufficient amount of money, buys himself what we call a “top” computer of that time – Amiga 1000, which almost no one had.

And this is the one Amiga 1000

Next, Jones decides to take up programming, as we already understand, to fulfill his dream. He enrolls in special courses at the Institute of Technology, where things are going so well for him that already in his second year the guy begins to implement his plans. Without thinking too much, he invites a man he knows from the club named Tony Smith, whose talents include artistic talent, to collaborate on a project. The couple releases their first product for the Amiga platform, which is gradually coming to the masses – Draconia, in the genre scrolling shoot-’em-up. The game borrowed a lot from other projects and skimped a little on accuracy, making it look like a clone rather than an independent project. Before presenting the game to the public, David decides to release it not on his own behalf, but on behalf of the studio, the defining name of which, according to his idea, was the title DMA Design (“Direct Memory Access”, rus. "Direct memory access").

At this moment, David Jones still has no idea what this will all lead to and what a great future awaits his endeavors.

By the way, sometimes, in the future, when people asked what “DMA” meant, the company laughed it off, saying it stood for “Doesn’t Mean Anything”, i.e.e. "Doesn’t mean anything"

However, I’d rather focus on what happened next. David, of course, gave his not yet official studio a name, but to release the game it was necessary to get a publisher. The first thing he did was visit the company Hewson Consultants, the face of which was game programmer Andrew Braybrook, who was one of the “very important people” in the production of video games at that time (Braybrook was indeed very famous then). Andrew liked Jones’s project and agreed to publish it, but with one condition: David had to rewrite the code of the game so that it would turn into a port of the game Zynaps for Amiga. Jones refuses the proposed contract – this is his game and he does not agree to such drastic changes.

Having abandoned the idea with Hewson Consultants, David meets and gets acquainted with the head of the company at one of the events Psygnosis – Ian Hotherington. Ian not only agrees to the Draconia publishing house, but also offers Jones a then-famous composer – David Whittaker, who writes a simple, but evocative soundtrack for his project. As a result, having only slightly edited the game (including its title) to fit the terms of the contract from Psygnosis, the game was released under the title Menace and successfully sells into the hands of consumers, bringing Jones a good profit.

Cover Menace. Year 1988.

Official DMA and new beginnings.

Now, having money, David decides to label his duo team as a full-fledged studio and instantly officially registers it. Then he rents a small office from one of his relatives and hires new employees – two comrades from KACC.

The publisher decides that Menace should be ported to MS-DOS And Atari ST. Recruits immediately get to work with increased tenacity, completing it successfully. Psygnosis, seeing how successfully DMA Design employees cope with the task, begins to trust them with many other ports of popular games. The studio is provided with work and David quits his studies at the Institute of Technology. His mentors, by the way, couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to make a living developing video games.

After parting with the courses, David, that is, DMA Design, begins to develop a new game, the final development of which just arrived on the anniversary of their first project and was called Blood Money.

I don’t know if this can be called irony, but in the future (1994).) the same Institute of Technology is the first in the world to begin teaching computer game programming courses, and David Jones receives an honorary title "Master of Technology"

The distribution of the game https://onlinepoker247.co.uk/casino-bonus/ Blood Money occupied two floppy disks and when the game started, a very rich and unusual splash screen was shown, after which it was necessary to insert a second floppy disk, i.e.To. half the weight of the game was this very splash screen.

By the way, if a player died in BloodMoney, this was accompanied by the phrase "Spent" "YOU WERE WASTED".

Cover Blood Money. Year 1989.

Relatively low ratings, however, did not greatly affect the sales of the game and DMA received its money in full, thanks to which the company’s team expands to 8 people. Some of them begin to develop the sequel to Blood Money, and the remaining free hands continue to port other projects. The guys, in principle, were doing a good job until the moment when two of the employees began to have a heated argument. One of them (Mike Daly) argued that 8 pixels is enough to create a more or less recognizable character, but the second (Scott Johnston) insisted that for this purpose it is necessary to use at least 16 pixels. In order not to go down with his statements, Mike, as proof of his words, creates a character 8 pixels in width and height. He animated everything in the following way: the character simply walks forward, and in the end dies. One character is always followed by another and also dies. There were several options for dying (for example, from a cannon shot)

It all happened quickly and looked a lot of fun.

The guys showed this creativity to another programmer in the team – Russell Kay, who proposed the idea of ​​making a full-fledged game out of it. But because of these experiments, the guys were distracted from their main work and David became interested in the reason for this behavior of the employees. Seeing what’s happening on the screen, he immediately realizes that implementing Russell’s idea might be worth it. Kay got the right to make a demo playable version of the project to show what Psygnosis had come up with, and soon it was he who came up with the idea of ​​​​naming these suicidal characters – Lemmings.

There is a myth that if the ratio of the spawn of Lemmings and their death (they die from accidents, and not stably and irrevocably) differs by a large number towards the first, then when there are too many of them on the screen, they will all at once either drown in the river or jump into the abyss. However, Lemmings do not have the ability to walk in a “clump” in one direction, so the myth is considered unconfirmed.

After Psygnosis’ approval, Lemmings became the most important development project, with other projects being pushed to the side (most of which never even saw the light of day in the future). Full work has begun. Various effects began to be added to the game, music was written (moreover, written in the style of the 60s) and, most interestingly, various levels were added, the creation of which was carried out by almost the entire team. And no wonder, because David promised everyone whose level(s) make it into the final version of the game – 10 pounds per level. Apparently, this served as a good motivation for creating a large number of interesting ones.

By the way, Scott Johnston (the guy who claimed that you need at least 16 pixels to create a clear character) had a younger brother who also worked at DMA. So, it was the mother of these brothers who voiced the Lemmings.

It is also interesting that after the game was sent to Psygnosis for a verdict, the publishers contacted the DMA every day for several days and provided a verbal report on the passage. The result of such a long inspection was not only the fact that there are a lot of missions in the game, but also the fact of their complexity. As a result, DMA had to add more than 20 more levels to the game, which should have been easier, and also reworked some of the ready-made missions, which led them to the idea of ​​dividing the game into as many as 4 (by the way, well-balanced) difficulty levels.

Having spent a total of 2 years developing the game, in 1991 it was released under the simple name familiar to us – Lemmings!

Cover Lemmings. Year 1991.

Age of Lemmings.

It happened on February 14, 1991. The publisher’s good work caused the DMA phone to ring off the hook almost hourly. Calls from Psygnosis reported another sales record that had just been set. When all the stores were already closed in the evening, it turned out that the game had sold a little more than 55 copies.000 copies only for Amiga.

After 15 years, the total number of Lemmings sales was 15.000.000 copies on as many as 30 existing platforms, and the game itself has taken a place in all known and unknown tops.

It’s not even worth mentioning how much attention DMA attracted from other game development adherents; there was no end to journalists. David decides to hire new artists for the company, because the team was preparing to release an addition to Lemmings in the fall – Oh no! More Lemmings! In addition to artists, Jones needed new programmers, because during the development of their projects, the guys no longer gave preference to porting games, and Lemmings needed to be released on various home consoles. Soon DMA was forced to move to a larger office; 20 people with equipment did not fit in the old one.

And, as often happens, the developers are captivated by the success of Lemmings, so that only green-haired weirdos with suicidal tendencies become their priority. So they spent the whole year preparing for Christmas Holiday Lemmings (which, by the way, was not big, it had only 16 levels). Then, in April 1993, a full-fledged sequel was released Lemmings 2: The Tribes. The game was not ported to as many platforms as the first part, but it only strengthened fans’ faith in DMA. The sequel had very good ratings, the industry was pleased.

Cover Lemmings 2: The Tribes. Year 1993.

Growing older..

After the overwhelming success of Lemmings, which made a major contribution to the development of DMA, David decides to quit programming and plunges headlong into researching new concepts, which he immediately tried to use for his products. DMA had several projects ready, but most of them were too outdated. You remember the unfinished development of the sequel? Blood Money? So, the game was soon radically changed: not to mention the fact that it changed the genre, the main character also changed (now the player controlled a robot), the locations of the action changed (there was even Los Angeles in 2019), bosses were added and, interestingly, the game character himself was controlled using the keyboard or joystick, and his aim was controlled separately – using the mouse.

There were also unique projects: for example, a game in the RPG genre, the action of which took place in modern realities, the main characters were four characters at once (who had to be controlled separately, but they were on the screen at the same time. And they were controlled only by the mouse). Each character had his own inventory, his own characteristics and their unique distribution. The game was named Hired Guns, however, despite the fact that the game’s reviews were very positive, it did not sell well. So, having completed work on another “Lemmings”, Scott Johnston leaves the studio. Soon his brother leaves her too.

Cover Hired Guns. Year 1993.

The losses were significant, but the only ones: Russell Kay, who, as you remember, was the first to express the idea of ​​\u200b\u200btranslating the idea with Lemmings into a full-fledged game, also leaves DMA to found his own studio Visual Sciences. Russell never revealed to David the reasons for leaving, but it was clearly not a matter of personal conflicts between the first and second, because subsequently Visual Sciences often took contracts from DMA to port their games for other platforms.

But all these events paled in front of the main thing: an international corporation Sony buys out Psygnosis, which it implements into Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.

Do you remember, remember this sound?

DMA is left without a publisher and understands that it is also left without Lemmings, because the rights to release them remained with Psygnosis. Jones, however, didn’t even bat an eye, because he was already in full communication with the bosses of the famous Nintendo, which invites him to release a game for their console.
Having completed the final (under the unfinished contract from Psygnosis) chapter of Lemminogs – The Lemmings Chronicles, David, in 1994, switches entirely to SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) – 16-bit console from Nintendo.

Prefix SNES from Nintendo.

Having turned over a bunch of concepts and ideas, Jones settles on the option proposed to him by a young programmer (Andrew Inne) – a unicycle simulator with realistic physics. The project slowly began to exist, but after visiting Leicestershire (County in England) office RARE, David changed his mind about the technical graphics capabilities of the SNES, and then invested a significant amount (half a million pounds) in the equipment Silicon Graphics, making DMA Design the most technologically advanced graphics studio in the UK. The unicycles in the new game were rendered with incredible precision (down to the screws on the frames), considering that their image was only 32 pixels wide and high. However, the game was very demanding, which is why some “features” had to be abandoned. As a result of the game devouring computer resources, it was necessary to remake the original idea of ​​​​unicycle racing into something that became a kind of introduction to such future projects as for example Tony Hawks: Pro Skater. The project was named Unirally. During the game, the player had to race on a unicycle at high speed around the track and perform various tricks, thereby increasing his speed even more. Since the game (namely the gameplay) was somewhat similar to Sonic: The Hedgehog, it had a built-in censorship scanner, thanks to which the player could not enter swear words as a nickname, but this was done only so that the player could not enter words such as "Sonic" And "Sega".

Box with Unirally. Year 1994.

The first circulation of the game exceeded 300.000 boxes, however the second edition was canceled. The reason was that the studio Pixar (yeah) suing DMA, t.To. believes that unicycles were blatantly stolen from their short film Red’s Dream.

Jones loses the case and the judge bans both the production and distribution of cartridges with the Unirally game.

This was the first DMA trial, however, I think you know that today Rockstar is one of the most sued game companies in the world.

But losing the case and stopping production of Unirally did not have a bad effect on Nintendo; they really liked the project and commissioned Jones to develop a game for Kirby, which would have been controlled by a mouse for the SNES, but the second one sold poorly and the game was canceled. True, after a couple of years the project still comes out Kirby’s Fun Pack, which contains a warning that the mouse is no longer needed. All the same, the game is not selling well, but for DMA Design this, however, does not become a black streak. Nintendo lists them as top developers for future-ready platform Nintendo 64. Jones recruits new employees who fill the office, so much so that they have to move again. This time – to the largest office, or rather an office complex in Dundee. After all, the company already employed about 80 employees. At almost the same time, the head of the DMA opens a branch in Edinburgh, where one of the projects for the Nintendo 64 is being prepared.

Platform Nintendo64 from Nintendo.

Not all studio members were ready to develop games for the Nintendo 64, and some were not able to. One day, one of the employees shows Jones a demo of a graphics engine written by Mike Daly (yes, this is the same guy who posted evidence that 8 pixels are enough to create a recognizable character). A special feature of its new technology was that the engine allowed you to display a top view (analogous to a bird’s eye view). In this very demo version, the engine displayed buildings, roads with markings, the intermediate distance between roofs, and even automatically changed the scaling, depending on the speed of movement of the object on whose behalf the action took place.

For David Jones, as soon as he saw the engine and all its capabilities, a light bulb clearly lit up over his head, which brought with it the idea of ​​​​creating a game where the player, in the role of a police officer, chases criminals in a car among dense road traffic (including various vehicles) and crowded sidewalks with other avenues and boulevards. All the action was supposed to take place from above, and this was explained by the fact that the game was being watched from the camera of a police helicopter. However, the whole stormy flow and outburst of Jones’s ideas did not even think of ending. He also wanted to dilute this whole game with multiplayer, in which everything should have been something like this: one side of the players controls the police, the other controls the criminals. There were some other minor ideas and the idea is being implemented. The project was called Race’n’Chase, and Jones turned to the publisher BMG Interactive Entertainment, relatively recently opened in London. All this happened in 1995.

BMG Interactive Entertainment. Year 1995.

At this publishing house he meets with the director of product development, a man named Sam Houser (yeah). The crisis of projects that Sam was supposed to prepare for release was reaching almost its maximum level..