United Kingdom-based Ruffian Games, the team best known for developing Microsoft’s Crackdown 2, has officially joined the Rockstar Games family. Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive recently acquired Ruffian Games, which last week rebranded itself as Rockstar Dundee.
According to Video Games Chronicle, documents via Companies House–the UK’s registrar of companies–show that Take-Two now holds a controlling stake of the Crackdown 2 developer. On top of the controlling stake, which amounts to over 75 percent, the address for the newly minted Rockstar Dundee is now registered as that of Rockstar’s London office.
Details about what the studio may have up its sleeve are presently scarce. It’s likely to remain that way for a while, too. However, an announcement from October 2019 noted the team was hard at work on “unspecified titles for Rockstar Games” at the time. The two studios uniting in such a manner seems even more fitting, since a number of Rockstar Dundee’s staffers once contributed to the creation of Rockstar’s Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto franchises.
Rockstar Dundee was first established in early 2008. In the summer of 2010, the group released its debut project, the Microsoft Studios-published Crackdown 2. The development team’s close relationship with Microsoft Studios continued to blossom for several years thereafter. It collaborated with other developers on many a Kinect-centric experience and even worked alongside 343 Industries to produce The Master Chief Collection on Xbox One. Given the team’s rather intriguing pedigree, it should be interesting to see where Rockstar Dundee’s talents take it under the Take-Two and Rockstar umbrella.
[Source: Companies House via Video Games Chronicle]
