According to documents filed on the UK’s Companies House registrar, Crackdown 2 developer Ruffian Games is now operating as Rockstar Dundee and has become part of the large stable of worldwide Rockstar studios.
As first reported by TheGamer, Ruffian Games became Rockstar Dundee on October 6, with Rockstar’s parent company, Take-Two Interactive, taking ownership of the Scotland studio on October 1. Back in October 2019, Ruffian Games announced it was working with Rockstar on “unspecified titles.” Before this, Ruffian Games developed Crackdown 2 and assisted in the development of various other games, including a slew of Kinect titles and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
Ruffian Games was founded in 2008 by Billy Thomson and Gaz Liddon, two developers who had left Realtime Worlds, the studio behind the original Crackdown. That studio, which shut down in 2010, was founded by David Jones, one of the creators of the original Grand Theft Auto. So Rockstar Games DNA can be found throughout both studios.
No official word on what the newly christened Rockstar Dundee is working on, but considering the studio helped port and remaster the old Halo games, my educated guess is that the studio might be assisting in getting Grand Theft Auto V running on the new consoles or even—I’m just spitballing, there’s no official confirmation of next-gen RDR—porting Red Dead Redemption II over to PS5 and Xbox Series X / S.
Kotaku has reached out to Rockstar Games about the new studio.