Though titles like Menace and Blood Money from doris89592's blog

When he was five or six, Sam's wealthy solicitor father took him to a London jazz club to meet Dizzy Gillespie. "What are Dark And Darker Gold you going to do when you grow up, son?" the legendary trumpeter asked. "Are you going to be a bank robber?" 


Sam would do better than that, enabling millions of bank robberies the world over. Grand Theft Auto didn't start in London, though. It was born further north, in the Dundee offices of DMA Design. 


Though titles like Menace and Blood Money might have suggested vicious Steve McQueen flicks, they were in fact sidescrolling space shooters, part of the '80s post-arcade culture that made the fortunes of early game development moguls like DMA founder Dave Jones.


However, the studio's first international success wasn't GTA but Lemmings, the darkly comic yet family-friendly puzzle-platformer. Lemmings was the Assassin's Creed of its day, spawning sequels and spin-offs through the '90s (Oh No! More Lemmings, All New World of Lemmings, Lemmings Paintball, Holiday Lemmings 1994). 


It funded multiple teams, a motion-capture studio, and even a team of in-house musicians—sufficient sprawl that GTA could be developed by a team that, for the most part, had never shipped a game before.


Jones, having built his terrarium for buy Dark And Darker Gold digital lemmings to mill about in, wanted to upgrade to a virtual living city—a dynamic crosshatch of streets where pedestrians strolled and cars honked. 


Previous post     
     Next post
     Blog home

The Wall

No comments
You need to sign in to comment