From Dundee, with Lemmings

The Timex factories at Milton and Camperdown were among Dundee's biggest employers in the 1960s and 1970s. When digital watches changed the business, the company diversified and began making computers for Clive Sinclair, among them the ZX Spectrum ^[2]. Dave Jones joined Timex as an apprentice hardware engineer. He had built a ZX81 from a kit, to save money, and it was what he knew about electronics that got him the job ^[1].

When the factory offered voluntary redundancy, Jones took it and spent the money on a Commodore Amiga. He told his parents it was "an investment in my future"; years later he confessed that what he really wanted was to play the latest games ^[1]. On that Amiga he wrote Menace, an arcade-style shoot-'em-up. Psygnosis, of Liverpool, saw a demo at a show and agreed to publish it, and part of the payment was a 2 MB memory expansion ^[1].

The redundancy money from the factory where Sinclair computers were assembled paid for the Amiga on which DMA's first game was born.

Jones was not alone. At the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club, a computer club in Dundee, Jones, the oldest in the group, had made friends with Steve Hammond and Russell Kay; Mike Dailly had joined the club in 1984, aged 14 ^[3]. They were the core of DMA Design, founded in 1987 or 1988, depending on the source ^[2][3]. The name came from "direct memory access", a phrase from the Amiga manuals; later, Jones took to saying the letters stood for "Doesn't Mean Anything" ^[3].

Lemmings was born from a bit of fun. While working on another game, Walker, Mike Dailly drew some tiny characters in Deluxe Paint, in an 8 × 8 pixel box, walking endlessly; Gary Timmons made them less stiff, and Russell Kay, on seeing them, said: "There's a game in that!" He was also the one who called them lemmings ^[4]. Jones says he thought: what if the player could control where they go? ^[1]

The game came out for the Amiga on 14 February 1991, from Psygnosis. The most quoted figure speaks of 55,000 copies sold on the first day ^[4]; Jones himself speaks of more than 100,000 ^[1]. Lemmings was later ported to more than twenty platforms ^[3] and, by Mike Dailly's count, sold 15 million copies between 1991 and 2006 ^[4].

In April 1995, DMA started work on a game called Race'n'Chase, in which the player was a policeman chasing criminals. The idea did not excite the team and the roles were reversed: the player became the criminal ^[5]. The game came out in November 1997 under another name, Grand Theft Auto, and the creative director, Gary Penn, described it as "basically Elite in a city", a reference to the 1980s space exploration classic ^[5].

DMA passed to Gremlin in 1997 and to Take-Two in 1999, and in May 2002 it became Rockstar North, based in Edinburgh ^[3]. In Dundee the seed remained: studios such as DMA and 4J Studios paved the way for a new generation of games companies in the city, and in 1997 the University of Abertay began offering game design courses ^[2].