Rockstar Games are one of the world’s most influential video game publishers. Even if people don’t recognize their name, they’ll recognize their games like Red Dead Redemption, Max Payne, and the Grand Theft Auto series. They may recall the controversies surrounding GTA: San Andreas, Manhunt, and Bully from the mid-2000s too. That said, these games didn’t come out of a vacuum.
Behind these big hits are a few titles that would either pave the way for Rockstar’s biggest hits, provide a preview for whatever new tech they were working with, or test the waters for a new genre that would revolutionize gaming as a whole. Whatever their impact, these are the most experimental games made by Rockstar.
6 Space Station Silicon Valley
Before it became Rockstar Games, the company was just a chunk of Take-Two Interactive. They’d set themselves apart from their parent publisher when they acquired assets from BMG Interactive. This deal also got them DMA Design, the Scottish game studio behind Lemmings, the original top-down Grand Theft Auto games, and this strange Nintendo 64 platformer.
Space Station Silicon Valley sees players control Evo, a robot that has to possess different creatures in order to travel different levels safely and collect the pieces necessary to repair itself and stop the space station from crashing into the Earth. The gameplay was quite novel, like a Super Mario Odyssey demake without Mario. Its open levels were also interesting, as it would inspire the studio's later output.
5 Body Harvest
DMA Design’s other N64 game is perhaps more famous for its tortured development. It was originally going to be an RPG published by Nintendo, filling in the hole Squaresoft left when they took Final Fantasy 7 to the PS1. But the working relationship between the Scottish studio and Nintendo was strained by the latter’s controlling approach, high demands, and the language barrier.
It ultimately became a third-person shooter published by Gremlin Interactive and Midway. Players had to blast aliens, save humans, and travel across vast levels in a variety of vehicles: tanks, trucks, motorbikes, cars, and more. The ability to switch between running around and shooting on foot, to driving anything and everything was a potent mix, and one the newly formed Rockstar Games were happy to capitalize on.
4 Grand Theft Auto 3
Space Station Silicon Valley showed how DMA Design adjusted to open 3D-style level exploration. Body Harvest took that and added guns and driveable vehicles to the mix. Grand Theft Auto 3 would combine those two into one big, open level filled with different objectives, mini-games, and other fun ways to indulge in the carnage its predecessors thrived on.
It’s hard to imagine the project having doubters, but it wasn’t until the game came out that people saw what was special about it. More active than SimCity, more explosive than Shenmue, GTA3 remade the sandbox genre in its own image. Without it, there’d be no Crackdown, InFamous, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Red Dead Redemption, Saints Row, and more games of its ilk.
3 Rockstar Presents Table Tennis
Being a publisher, Rockstar Games had more than just DMA Design (now Rockstar North) under their wing. They also acquired Angel Studios (now Rockstar San Diego), which produced Smuggler’s Run, the Midnight Club series, the Red Dead series, and the visual effects for The Lawnmower Man weirdly enough. They also created the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, or RAGE. It could make vast, open-world levels, provide more realistic physics, and more.
Yet its first game was a simple table tennis sim. It was surprisingly tame, given it came out right when the company was courting controversy with GTA: San Andreas and the Manhunt games. But it showed off the engine’s potential and gave Xbox 360 owners a simple, fun, table tennis game for a budget price. It just happened to be made on the same engine that would make GTA4, GTA5, and both Red Dead Redemption games.
2 Beaterator
Möbius Entertainment didn’t make too many things of note before they became Rockstar Leeds. Not unless there are any fans of the Game Boy Color and PS1 versions of Alfred Chicken out there. Afterward, they made GTA: Liberty City Stories, GTA: Vice City Stories, the PSP ports of Manhunt 2 and The Warriors, and Beaterator.
It was originally an Adobe Flash music mixer from 2005 where players could make their own loops, complete with sounds and effects by Timbaland. Then they could share their work with their friends via the Rockstar Games Social Club. Despite the studio’s name, music and rhythm games weren’t really Rockstar’s forte. Yet they made this treat to reasonable acclaim, then spruced it up for a PSP and iOS release in 2009.
1 L.A Noire
This one only technically counts as being part of Rockstar as Team Bondi began work on the game under Sony Computer Entertainment in 2004. Rockstar Games would only gain the publishing rights to the game in 2006, but they would provide help via their different studios up until the game’s eventual release in 2011. Part of L.A. Noire's tortured development was due to its use of the tricky, cutting-edge MotionScan tech.
It was a device that would use 32 cameras to motion-capture an actor’s entire head. With it, it could produce more realistic facial captures, which still look solid today. The idea was that the more lifelike expressions would aid the player in determining whether a witness or suspect was telling the truth or lying. It was a unique approach to detective games, and the tech was interesting, but not worth the backstage drama.