DMA Design: From Lemmings to Grand Theft Auto

The standard version of this story is a punchline. The nice Scottish boys who made the game about saving little creatures grew up and made the game about running people over. Six years, Dundee to Dundee, Lemmings to Grand Theft Auto, and isn’t the industry funny.

I’ve never found that reading satisfying, because it treats the two games as opposites when they’re the same game seen from different heights. DMA Design spent its entire existence making software about crowds — dumb, autonomous, numerous things moving through a space on rules, and a player poking at them. Lemmings is that from above, with sympathy. Grand Theft Auto is that from above, with a car.

Doesn’t Mean Anything

David Jones founded it in Dundee at the tail end of the 80s while working at Timex, and the name has two competing stories attached — Direct Mind Access from the group’s demoscene days, and Doesn’t Mean Anything, which is the one Jones has repeated most often. The second is funnier and probably truer.

Menace arrived in 1988, published by Psygnosis, and Blood Money followed in 1989. Both are side-scrolling shooters, both are technically strong, and both are wearing the Psygnosis house look — the airbrushed box, the enormous first impression, the hostile difficulty. Blood Money is the better of the two and has a genuinely good idea in it: you collect cash from kills and spend it in shops, so a good player is a rich player and a rich player survives. Money as a skill readout.

Neither game suggests what’s coming. They’re the work of talented people doing a genre properly, which describes most of the Amiga’s catalogue.

The accident

Lemmings started as an animation test. Mike Dailly was working in Deluxe Paint, messing about with tiny sprites — the story as the team has told it is that he made a small character about eight pixels tall walking along, and someone in the office, Russell Kay by most accounts, said there was a game in it.

The reason this origin matters is what it constrains. An eight-pixel character has no face, no animation nuance and no capacity to act. He can walk, and he can stop walking. Every design decision in Lemmings follows from having a protagonist with no interiority and no agency, of which there are a hundred on screen.

So the player becomes the interiority. You can’t move a lemming. You can only assign it a job — digger, builder, blocker, climber — from a limited allocation, and then watch what the world does to it. That’s an extraordinary control scheme. You are managing a crowd’s properties rather than its actions, and the game’s tension comes from the gap between issuing an instruction and seeing the consequence.

And the consequence is death, constantly, comically, at scale. I’ve written about Lemmings as slapstick tragedy and the mechanism is worth restating here because it’s DMA’s signature: the game is funny because the units are dumb and numerous, and it’s affecting because you are the only thing in the world that can help them. The little scream when one falls too far does more emotional work than most character animation budgets.

Psygnosis published it in 1991 and it sold in the millions, on everything — the Amiga original, then a port to essentially any machine with a screen. Oh No! More Lemmings, Lemmings 2: The Tribes, All New World of Lemmings followed. Lemmings 2 is the ambitious one, with sixty tribes and a much wider job list, and it’s a good demonstration that the original’s austerity was load-bearing. Eight jobs is a design. Sixty is a menu.

The middle years

What DMA did next is the part everybody skips, and it’s where the studio actually learned its trade.

Hired Guns (1993) is a four-player split-screen dungeon crawler on one Amiga — four characters, four viewports, four people on the same keyboard. It’s an insane technical proposition and it mostly works. Walker (1993) is the mech game the Lemmings animation test was originally a part of, and it’s a fine, hard, slightly cold thing.

Uniracers — Unirally in Europe — hit the SNES in 1994, and it’s a fast stunt racer built around a unicycle doing tricks on a 2D track. It’s excellent and it’s effectively unavailable, because Pixar sued over the animated unicycle’s resemblance to the star of Red’s Dream and won. A good game removed from the record by a copyright judgement is a useful reminder that the archive we have is partly an accident of legal history.

Body Harvest (1998) is the crucial one. Nintendo funded it, publicly soured on it, and eventually dropped it — Midway shipped it on the N64 in the end. It’s an open-world game where you drive and walk around a large landscape shooting aliens that eat civilians, and it is a mess: the mission structure is stiff, the pop-in is severe, the tone is confused.

It’s also, unmistakably, the prototype. Free movement through a persistent landscape, vehicles you get in and out of at will, an ambient population that exists to be preyed upon, missions layered on top of a world that runs regardless. Every one of those is a GTA component, shipped and debugged two years early, on a cartridge, at a studio that had learned crowd simulation on Lemmings.

Race’n’Chase

Grand Theft Auto shipped in 1997 and it began life as Race’n’Chase, a cops-and-robbers game with the player on both sides of the chase. The pivot to letting you play the criminal is the origin story everyone tells, and the more interesting fact is the top-down camera, which was a technical decision the design then discovered it liked.

Look at what the top-down view does. It’s the Lemmings camera. You are above a city full of autonomous entities running simple rules — pedestrians walk, cars follow lanes, police respond to a wanted level — and you’re the one variable that behaves differently. The whole appeal of GTA’s first two games is watching a rule-governed crowd react to something it has no rule for.

That’s Lemmings with the sympathy inverted. Same architecture, same view, same delight in watching dumb agents fail predictably. In one you spend your attention keeping the crowd alive; in the other you spend it finding out what the crowd does when you drive at it. The design instinct — build a legible system of simple agents and let the player be the anomaly — never changed at all.

The other thing GTA got right early was the radio, and the wanted-level economy, where escalation is a resource you manage rather than a punishment you receive. Those are real systems. The controversy machine that Max Clifford ran around the launch got the press, and it obscured the fact that GTA 1 is a well-built little sandbox with a genuinely novel relationship between player and world. I’d argue it’s also the last GTA that is honestly about the systems, before the series became a satire delivery mechanism with driving attached.

GTA 2 followed in 1999 with gang reputation layered on top — a decent idea slightly ahead of the hardware’s capacity to make it legible.

The disappearance

The corporate end is quick and it’s the standard shape. Gremlin Interactive bought DMA in 1997. Infogrames bought Gremlin in 1999. Take-Two bought DMA out of that same year, and the studio — by now in Edinburgh — shipped Grand Theft Auto III in 2001 and was renamed Rockstar North in 2002. David Jones had already left, to found Realtime Worlds, where he made Crackdown and then APB, which failed expensively.

So the name is gone and the lineage isn’t. Whatever you think of what Rockstar became, GTA III’s achievement is a Dundee achievement: taking the crowd-and-anomaly design that Lemmings established, that Body Harvest ported into a 3D landscape, and that GTA proved worked in a city, and finally having the hardware to do it at eye level.

Dundee is now a games town with a university course feeding it, which is the kind of regional industrial outcome that almost never happens and is worth noticing when it does.

What the career shows

DMA is the strongest counter-argument I know to the idea that a studio has a genre. They made a puzzle game, a mech game, a dungeon crawler, a unicycle stunt racer and an open-world crime sim, and the through-line is a design question rather than a subject: what happens when you put a player above a lot of simple things running rules?

That question has produced Lemmings, GTA, and by inheritance a good chunk of the modern open world — including the tower that every open world puts on the map, which is a device for making a crowd legible from above. It’s the most productive question anyone in British development asked in the 90s, and it started with a man drawing an eight-pixel figure to see if he could.

Where to start

Lemmings on the Amiga, and play far enough in that you’re sacrificing a blocker deliberately. That’s the moment the design opens.

GTA 1 on PC, briefly, to see the Lemmings camera doing the opposite job.

Body Harvest if you’re curious, and only if you’re curious. It’s a bad game and an important document.