Rockstar Vienna

» see rockstarvienna.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Neo Software Produktions was registered in Hirtenberg on 4 January 1993 and moved to Vienna the year after. For most of the nineties it made PC games for the German-speaking market, the kind that sold respectably between Hamburg and Vienna and were barely exported at all: Whale's Voyage in 1993, then a burglary-planning game called The Clue! that is still remembered in Germany and almost nowhere else. Take-Two bought the company in 2001.

In January 2003 it was folded into Rockstar Games and renamed Rockstar Vienna. The work that followed was conversion work of a high order, including the Xbox versions of Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City and console ports of Max Payne before those. By 2004 the studio had a project of its own in Manhunt 2 and about a hundred and ten staff, which made it the biggest game developer in Austria.

On the night of 9 May 2006 Take-Two closed it. Nobody inside was told. Staff arriving on the morning of the tenth found security guards at the entrance who would not let them in, and that was the whole of the notice given. The only public explanation offered was a line about the challenging environment facing the video game business during a platform transition, which was doing a lot of work for a lot of companies that year.

Grand Theft Auto in Turkey in those years lived on PC, in internet cafes, where Vice City sat on half the machines and the radio stations were the main thing anyone argued about. The versions Rockstar Vienna built were the Xbox ones, and the Xbox barely existed in Turkey at the time, in the shops or in anybody's living room. I played a lot of what this studio worked on without ever touching a build it made.

~ the chronicle ~

~ before rockstar ~

Neo Software belongs to a European PC scene that turned out a lot of competent, specific games for a German-reading audience and then disappeared along with it. The Clue! put you in 1930s London assembling a crew and casing buildings before a burglary, and it has the exact texture of a product made for people who read one of two magazines and bought boxes in a particular set of shops. Alien Nations in 1999 was the last thing to carry the old name.

~ the morning of the tenth ~

A hundred and ten jobs in a country with one large game studio is the entire industry. Eurofound logged the event as a closure with roughly a hundred job losses and recorded that neither the management nor Take-Two supplied any background for it. Austrian practice normally routes a mass dismissal through a works council, and there was no works council at this company to trigger, which is part of how it could be done in a single night.

Two of the founders, Hannes Seifert and Niki Laber, started again in 2007 with a studio called Games That Matter. Koch Media bought it and renamed it Deep Silver Vienna. That one closed in 2010.

~ the credits ~

Manhunt 2 was moved to Rockstar London and came out in October 2007, after its own long fight with ratings boards. When it shipped, the names of the Vienna team were not in the credits, despite two and a half years of work on it. The people who had done that work spent some effort afterward documenting what they had built, because the finished product no longer said.

rockstarvienna.com still resolves in 2026. It redirects to rockstargames.com, whose studios page has no Vienna on it. Rockstar Vancouver was folded into Rockstar Toronto in 2012 and kept its staff through the move; Vienna is the one that was switched off between a Tuesday night and a Wednesday morning.

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