Rockstar Games (1998-2020)

Rockstar Games
"Rockstars, at least they were until they f*cked everything up." — Carl "CJ" Johnson
Type: Subsidiary Predecessor: BMG Interactive Founded: December, 1998 Founder: Sam Houser Terry Donovan Jamie King Dan Houser (Before 2018) Headquarters: New York City, United States Key people: Sam Houser (President) Leslie Benzies (Video Game Producer, Before 2016) Parent: Take-Two Interactive Subsidiaries: Rockstar Dundee Rockstar India Rockstar International Rockstar Leeds Rockstar Lincoln Rockstar London Rockstar New England Rockstar North Rockstar San Diego Rockstar Toronto Website: rockstargames.com

Rockstar Games, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in New York City, New York. The company was established in December 1998 as a subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive, using the assets Take-Two had previously acquired from Bertelsmann's BMG Interactive. They're best known for publishing the Grand Theft Auto, Midnight Club, Red Dead, and Max Payne franchises.

Why They Were Rockstars Back Then

1. They set a whole new bar for open-world games since the release of Grand Theft Auto III
2. They made some of the greatest video game franchises of all time, such as Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead, and Max Payne.
3. Despite mostly focusing on open-world games, they also released games of other genres, such as: Max Payne, Midnight Club, and Smuggler's Run series, Rockstar Game's Presents: Table Tennis, Thrasher Presents: Skate and Destroy (which is also the very first game to make use of ragdoll physics), and State of Emergency.
4. Unlike some other companies, Rockstar actually took time to polish their titles before release.
5. They also really cared about and kept close to their fans and had a lot of fan service in their games, such as the "UFO" and "Aliens" myths that were famous in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas that came to live in Grand Theft Auto V.
6. All of their games tended to have awesome stories with really memorable characters.
7. Rockstar's games were known to be incredibly dedicated to details to make the games as life-like as possible and inserting a lot of extra content to increase the value of playing them. Many of their open-world games (specially Grand Theft Auto) tended to have lots of mini-games and quests that were really fun, such as racing, flying, or fighting.
   • Related to the above, their games contained a lot of Easter Eggs to discover.
   • Before completely focusing on GTA Online, they were still dedicated to their games during the 2010 era in which they gave their games DLCS and expansion packs like with GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption.
8. They always sided with gamers over political activists. For example, when GTA V was pulled from Target and K-Mart stores in Australia after it was falsely accused of "promoting violence against women", Rockstar's CEO Sam Houser stated that "If you don't like our games, then don't buy them!"
9. When their publisher partner company Take-Two Interactive discontinued the OpenIV modding tool for "allowing third parties to defeat security features of its software and modify their software in violation of Take-Two's rights" (even though OpenIV cannot be used for cheating), Rockstar apologized to fans for Take-Two's actions and later re-released OpenIV.
10. When they created Grand Theft Auto Online, it was a good game. That and the company used to be good until 2016.

Bad Qualities

1. They started to go slightly downhill since Leslie Benzies left in 2016 and Dan Houser left in 2018. However, it wasn't very noticeable until 2021 after the release of the infamous Grand Theft Auto The Trilogy: Definitive Edition.
2. Even before 2021, they released some mediocre games, such as: Grand Theft Auto: Advance and the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

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