Rockstar Vancouver

~ the last words ~

Six people left Radical Entertainment in May 1998 and set up Barking Dog Studios in Vancouver, formally starting work that 16 July once a publishing contract was signed. The first notable thing they did was not a game of their own at all. In 1999 they built roughly ninety percent of the Beta 5 update to Counter-Strike, back when Counter-Strike was still a modification and not yet the thing every network cafe on the planet would run for the next decade.

Homeworld: Cataclysm followed in 2000, an expansion sized entry in a series people were serious about, and it is still the work the original team gets cited for. Take-Two bought the studio on 1 August 2002 for three million dollars in cash plus restricted stock, valuing the whole thing at around nine million. About fifty people came with it. The name Barking Dog stopped existing and the sign said Rockstar Vancouver.

What they made under that sign was Bully in 2006, a game about a boarding school that argued with itself in public for a year before release and turned out to be one of the more carefully written things Rockstar has published. Then years of contributing to other studios' projects, ending with work on Max Payne 3 in 2012.

This is the part that reaches me sideways. Their code was in a Counter-Strike beta, and Counter-Strike is one of the few pieces of software from that era i can say with certainty was running on machines around me. The studio was in the room the whole time under a name nobody said out loud, first because it was a mod update credited to nobody in particular, and later because Rockstar games are attributed to Rockstar.

~ the record ~

~ before the name ~

Rockstar's studio structure is the reason almost nobody could name this place. There is a house style and a publishing name that carries everything, and the one internal studio the public ever learned to identify is Rockstar North, because Grand Theft Auto is worth identifying. The rest of the network worked on shared projects and shared credit.

That arrangement is efficient and it is also why the closure of a fourteen year old studio reads as an office move. Bully has a strong enough reputation to be remembered on its own, but it is remembered as a Rockstar game. The Vancouver part is a detail you have to go looking for.

~ the funny part ~

On 9 July 2012 Rockstar announced the studio was closing and merging into Rockstar Toronto, which was moving to a larger purpose built office in Oakville, Ontario. All 35 remaining employees were offered relocation to Toronto or to any other Rockstar studio, and the company said it planned to add more than fifty positions to the combined Canadian team. Jennifer Kolbe, running publishing and operations, said a single Canadian team would make for a powerful creative force on future projects.

So this is a studio death with no redundancies in it and no unpaid staff at the end. Every person had somewhere to go and the headcount went up rather than down. It still counts, because a studio is a specific group of people in a specific building with their own way of working, and moving them three thousand kilometers into another studio's culture ends that as surely as a bankruptcy does. The output stopped either way.

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