Like any other media form, games become famous when they achieve a certain level of notoriety. And few games have managed to outrage the moral censors as much as the Rockstar Games title Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar have been in operation for less than 20 years, but they have already shipped over 250 million titles worldwide and now hire over 900 employees in their New York base.
Rockstar have also endeavoured to spread their operations across the planet with sister companies emerging in locations as disparate as Tokyo, Toronto and Edinburgh. And their San Diego office was pivotal in the development of Red Dead Redemption that also courted controversy when it introduced a gambling feature that paralleled the innovations found in Royal Vegas Casino’s online games of slots, roulette and blackjack that could all be easily played from a mobile device.
Games studios have also frequently taken inspiration from the movies with London’s Rocksteady Studios developing the Arkham series that gave Batman a next-gen gaming future. The studio provided gamers with the chance to throw batarangs and drive the Batmobile, and again Royal Vegas Casino gave the caped crusader an extra lease of life with their Dark Knight Rises slots game that featured a range of Gotham-based motifs to add to the bat-based gambling fun.
Canadian game developers have also been enjoying the movie limelight, with the likes of Quebec City’s Beenox working on titles such as Monsters vs Aliens, Bee Movie and a range of Spiderman titles before moving on to develop massive games such as Call of Duty for the multi-billion dollar games publisher Activision/Blizzard.
And finally, the sporting arena has also benefited from the ingenuity of games developers with the phenomenal rise of Californian company Electronic Arts showing that, with its 33-year career, there’s still the chance for longevity in this rapidly-changing industry.
