BETA | STUDIOS // ROCKSTAR NORTH
Over 360 staff currently work at Rockstar North’s Edinburgh office –when it was founded it started with just 25
fans expect – and it’s a reputation we are proud to maintain. It’s an attitude that everyone who joins us needs to understand.” The games themselves are testament to
the fact North attracts people prepared to give it their all, and many perhaps at a stage in their lives where they can give it their all. The bar is high, but the studio management work hard to support and reward that effort. A lot of the North staff have worked on multiple GTA titles, CV credits money can buy. “If you’re going to make anything decent,
you have to work hard. NASA puts spaceships on the moon – they didn’t do that by working six hours a day,” quips Benzies. “So my point is that you have to do the work.” Benzies is talking about commitment and passion. Not crunch, which is about fatigue. “When there is too much work, then you address it. The games industry is a place where to work you have to love games, and when people love something they put the time in.” “Making a game is like making an album, a film and a spaceship all at once.” And the end result, an interactive experience like GTA, demands its audience listen to that album, watch the film and fly the spaceship all at once too.
RISING STARS The cumulative force of striving for perfection, however, is talent. Rockstar North is home to 360 stars of the games industry – and it wants more. While there are lots of experienced staff, the team has all worked keenly to find good colleagues. Says Semple: “We’ve had graduates that
have really impressed those older hands, and it’s where those two sides meet that you really benefit.” The impression, just looking around at the mix of faces, is that this is what’s helping the team remain eager and fresh. At the end of the day, it seems to be talent
that really matters to Semple. His biggest regret isn’t a lack of media profile for the
18 | OCTOBER 2013
studio specifically – versus the acres of words written about its creation – but things like missing out on helping with this year’s Dare to be Digital. He and Rockstar North have been a partner on it for years, but completion of GTA V took precedent in 2013. “Some of the brightest developers we have had came from that competition. We’d love to do more there, and give back to help create a thriving Scotland and UK games community. Time is always a problem for us –we’d love to do more but we end up having these massive games in our day job,” he jokes.
We’ve had graduates that have really impressed those older hands, and it’s where those two sides meet that you really benefit.
Andy Semple, Studio Director Our conversation with Semple turns back
to how all of this – a talent hotbed, focus on perfection – afforded North independence. To some in that still-big world of other publisher-run studios, that might sound like lunacy, but having someone tell Rockstar North what to do would likely be, says Semple, “the biggest risk of all.”
THE TECH
THE STUDIO LEADERSwill tell you that the last five per cent of making a GTA –the polish –matter just as much as the first 95 per cent. But you don’t get anywhere without decent technology. And it’s Rockstar North’s technical director
Adam Fowler and associate technical director Phil Hooker that have been in charge of the
enviable, if daunting, and bespoke technology that powers the worlds of Grand Theft Auto and other Rockstar games. Everything in the GTA games – apart from
stalwart tools like NaturalMotion Euphoria, Scaleform and Bink – is built using in-house streaming tech and game engine. Fowler has been at the company for 20
years, back when it was DMA Design, starting out on Lemmings 2 for the SNES. It was him who teamed up with Benzies and art lead Garbut to devise streaming technology, an innovation that made modern GTA what it is. “Streaming is the backbone of everything
we do,” says Fowler, who was the original architect of that game and its technology. “We made a major leap of faith that we
could do it – and luckily we did. At that point we knew we had a fairly large environment, and this vague idea we’d load it all in the background,” he says. But there was huge disbelief that the team, then just a part of DMA Design, would ever get it running. “It was a huge risk,” says Benzies, who recalls where the idea first came from. “We saw a game that had a CD running, streaming footage, but with polygons over the top –so we thought ‘What if that was footage of you driving around and it was a car overlaid?’ Adam’s a genius, he just ran off and did it, but everyone else in the studio thought we were nuts. “And we didn’t really know it would work out in the wild. Sure, we had it running on dev kits in the office, but they weren’t retail machines – for all we knew the game would wear the home consoles out with all that disc movement. That makes you shit yourself. Without that tech there wouldn’t be GTA. We needed it to run.” So powerful and instrumental was the
innovation, says Fowler, some of the lines of code ‘have probably survived from GTA III into V in some small way’.
TOOL’S GOLD Today, the tech principles are still the same when it comes to how the streaming works in
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