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Rockstar Leeds founder Gordon Hall dies

Gordon Hall, founder of GTA Chinatown Wars developer Rockstar Leeds, has died.The news emerges from various figures in …

www.gamesindustry.biz

Gordon Hall, founder of GTA Chinatown Wars developer Rockstar Leeds, has died.

The news emerges from various figures in the Yorkshire development scene, where he was largely based.

Hall's games career began by founding Möbius Entertainment in 1997, which produced a variety of Game Boy and Game Boy Advance titles. After its work on the GBA version of Max Payne, Rockstar Games acquired the studio and rebranded it as Rockstar Leeds.

Under Hall, the developer worked with fellow Rockstar teams to create titles such as Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and GTA: Chinatown Wars. Hall even worked at Rockstar San Diego in 2009, where he contributed to the development of Red Dead Redemption.

Between 2011 and 2013, he took a sabbatical to further research player psychology and microtransactions strategy, returning to games as chief creative officer for Activision Blizzard Mobile.

"Gordon was simply brilliant to be around, incredibly motivating and ever positive," said Martyn Brown, business development at Five Aces Publishing and co-founder of Team17.

"His pursuit of excellence was staggering and he formed a great, trusting bond with those who chose to work (hard) alongside him. As a close friend, he was truly inspirational and socially speaking a real energetic one-off who could endlessly entertain at the drop of a hat, holding everyone in the palm of his hand. Gordon will be very sadly missed."

 

[MiguelItUp]

Ugh, that's a shame. RIP.

 

[CamHostage]

Fucking sucks to be a fan of amazing GBA engines from back in the day. Fernando Velez of the renown VD-DEV duo died a few years ago, now one of the leads of Mobius/Rockstar Leeds.

For those who don't know about the studio (handheld game developers rarely got celebrated in their day,) this is some of their work:





Max Payne was their "whoa, that's on GBA?" game, but they also did GBA games of A Sound of Thunder (kind of Max Payne but with more open levels for lock-on combat plus a singlecart multiplayer mode...and a forgettable movie tie-in,) Bionicle, Army Men, and High Heat MLB. Mostly they worked for crappy publishers until Rockstar gave them a chance, but Mobius was doing interesting small-scale stuff for those who paid attention.

And then, they did great stuff for PSP with the awesome GTA Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories (RIP SAS... I always wished Leeds had gotten a chance to finish the trilogy on like Vita or Wii U or something), GTA Chinatown Wars on PSP/3DS/Mobile, The Warriors and Manhunt 2 PSP ports (also Midnight Club PSP, which looked nice but had some severe technical issues that Rockstar London fixed up in the second MC PSP, not sure if they used Leeds' PSP engine work and just fixed all the tough stuff that made it load so hard?) and the underrated Beaterator project.

 

[MrTroubleMaker]

RIP

 

[Grand Theft Scratchy]

I've yet to actually play Chinatown Wars, but Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories were great.

Rest in peace. Mr. Hall.