GTA 6 studio Rockstar North, the team Take-Two bought for 1 pound

Rockstar North, the Edinburgh studio building Grand Theft Auto VI, cost Take-Two Interactive exactly 1 pound. Take-Two bought it from Infogrames in 1999, when it was still called DMA Design. 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, and Gremlin Interactive bought it that same year for 4.2 million pounds. Two years later, one pound was enough. The Rockstar Games label itself dates from December 1998, founded by five people including Sam and Dan Houser.

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, bought by Rockstar in 2021.

The growth shows up 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 had about 22 employees in November 1992 and about 650 in 2018.

Leadership has turned over three times in six years. Leslie Benzies, studio president and lead producer from GTA III to GTA V, left Rockstar in January 2016. Dan Houser, co-founder and the principal writer of the series, left on March 11, 2020, and Michael Unsworth, vice president of writing, in 2023. Sam Houser is still president of Rockstar Games.

Inside Barclay House, July 2026

Rockstar North hosted a closed-door demonstration of GTA 6 in July 2026 and handed nobody a controller, journalists and invited creators alike. IGN, The New York Times, Kinda Funny, the YouTuber TGG and Dazed all watched the game run on site. TroisCouleurs, the only French-language outlet invited, published its interview with Rob Nelson on August 27, 2026, in which he dates the project to 2015 and puts the arrival of most of the team after Red Dead Redemption 2 shipped in 2018.

Working from home ended in April 2024, when Rockstar asked its staff back to the office.

Ten internal studios, and a team formed in Los Angeles

Take-Two describes Rockstar Games as ten internal studios. For GTA 6, a team of writers, directors and producers was assembled in Los Angeles to give individual art direction to NPCs, the non-player characters you walk past in the street.

Rockstar has never published the list of studios that worked on GTA 6, nor the size of the project team. The only public figure, dated August 28, 2026, is that its worldwide teams have “more than doubled” since Red Dead Redemption 2.