Around 6:30 last night, the WordPress app on my phone started going crazy. It was a pingback request from the SGN website, letting me know someone had just linked to a story.
It turned out to be a story from almost exactly one year ago, announcing that Ruffian was hiring people to work on ‘unspecified games’ for their friends at Rockstar.
It looks like they’ve been getting on really well, because the pings kept coming and the stories kept getting posted.
Since everyone else in the world has posted it, we can now announce that Take Two has acquired Dundee-based Ruffian Games and has rebranded the company as Rockstar Dundee.
Eagle-eyed journalists spotted that Ruffian’s Companies House listing changed at the start of October, with the studio’s founders resigning from their roles as directors and Take Two’s Chief Legal Officer stepping in.
As of October 6 2020, Ruffian ceased to be and Rockstar Dundee Limited was created.
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Ruffian was founded in 2008 and most famously worked on Crackdown 2. More recently, the studio has established a strong reputation in VR and porting projects, having worked on titles including: RADtv, Gears 5, Nike+ Kinect Training, Star Wars Kinect and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
Ruffian has also released it’s own original games, including the well-received, fast-paced, twin-stick shooter, Fragmental.
There’s no word on any plans for the new studio, the projects it will be working on, or whether it will grow, relocate or change significantly.
We’ve reached out to Ruffian’s founders to see if we can find out more. We’ll keep you posted…
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