Grand Theft Auto VI, expected to be the biggest entertainment launch in history, arrives on 19 November. The series was born in a Dundee studio in 1995, and three decades on, the city’s games industry is still in the game.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on Thursday 19 November, with analysts forecasting more than $3 billion in sales in its first year. Preloads open on 10 November.
The series that became the most anticipated game ever made began life in 1995, in a DMA Design office above a shop on Dundee’s Nethergate. Thirty-one years later, Rockstar’s Dundee studio is reported to be among the teams working on the new game, the first GTA with a Dundee hand in it since 1999.
It is the latest chapter in a remarkable story for a city of 150,000 people. Dundee gave the world Lemmings, put Minecraft on consoles, launched the world’s first games degrees and now has more games developers per head than anywhere else in the UK. This is how it happened.
Round one: the Nethergate years
Dundee’s games story starts with a factory and a computer club. In 1982, Clive Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum home computer was built at the Timex plant in Dundee. Two years later, a group of teenagers started meeting at the Kingsway Amateur Computer Club at what was then Kingsway Technical College. Among them were David Jones, Mike Dailly, Russell Kay and Steve Hammond.
Jones founded DMA Design in the late 1980s, and in August 1989 the studio moved into its first offices at 134B Nethergate. In 1991 it released Lemmings, a puzzle game about steering hapless little creatures to safety. It sold 55,000 copies on its first day and went on to sell more than 15 million. A plaque on the Nethergate building, unveiled by the original team in 2011, now marks it as the birthplace of Scotland’s games industry.
In March 1995, a DMA team sat down to discuss ideas for a new PC project. The result was a top-down crime game that the British establishment tried to ban before it reached the shelves: Grand Theft Auto, released in 1997. Grand Theft Auto 2 followed in 1999, also made in Dundee. DMA then moved to Edinburgh, joined Take-Two Interactive and in 2002 became Rockstar North, the studio that still leads the series today.
Round two: thirteen years of hype
Grand Theft Auto V came out in September 2013. It made $1 billion in three days and has since sold more than 215 million copies, making it one of the most successful entertainment products ever. The wait for its sequel has lasted more than 13 years, and the hype has grown to match.
Rockstar’s first trailer for GTA VI, released in December 2023, drew 90.4 million YouTube views in 24 hours. That earned a Guinness World Record for the most-viewed video game reveal. The second trailer, released on 6 May 2025, was watched 475 million times across all platforms in its first day, according to Rockstar. That beat the previous record for any trailer, set by Deadpool & Wolverine.
The game takes players to Leonida, Rockstar’s version of modern-day Florida, centred on a returning Vice City. For the first time in a mainline GTA, there are two lead characters: Lucia Caminos and Jason Duval, a criminal couple whose story plays out against a world of social media, nightlife, swamps and spectacle.
The road to launch has not been smooth. GTA VI was first promised for autumn 2025, then moved to 26 May 2026. On 6 November 2025, Rockstar pushed it back again, to 19 November 2026, saying the extra months would give the game the level of polish players expect. Take-Two has repeated that date at every earnings update since. In the US the standard edition costs $79.99, and a PC version has not been announced.
Round three: what the previews say
The first proper looks have only arrived in the last few months. In August, IGN watched 30 minutes of the game at Rockstar North in Edinburgh, played by co-studio head Rob Nelson. At the end of October, Edge magazine ran a cover feature built around a 90-minute demonstration. Rockstar told Edge the game has “an order of magnitude more interiors” than its predecessors.
The early verdicts are mostly glowing. Previewers describe a world more alive and reactive than any GTA before it. Cars need fuel and can be tracked, and police hunt for witnesses and descriptions after a robbery. A few critics are more cautious: PC Gamer loved Vice City but wondered whether the missions have really moved on from the series’ familiar formula.
Round four: the money
The numbers being forecast are so big they are hard to picture. Analysts at DFC Intelligence expect GTA VI to bring in $3.2 billion in its first year, roughly double what GTA V managed, with around $1 billion of that from pre-orders. Industry analyst Joost van Dreunen expects about 38 million copies to sell in the first 12 months. DFC thinks the game could reach 100 million copies within five years.
- GTA V’s first 12 months: about $1.66 billion
- GTA VI’s forecast first year: about $3.2 billion (DFC Intelligence)
- The boldest forecast: venture firm Konvoy predicted $7.6 billion in the first 60 days, though that was made when the game was still due in May
- GTA V’s lifetime sales: more than 215 million copies
For comparison, $3.2 billion is far more than the biggest film of 2024 took at the global box office. And unlike a film, GTA keeps earning: its online mode turned GTA V into a revenue machine for more than a decade, and an online mode for VI is expected to follow.
Round five: Dundee is still in the fight
Here is the part most coverage misses. GTA VI is not just a game with Dundee roots. It is reportedly being partly made here. In 2020, Rockstar bought the Dundee studio Ruffian Games and renamed it Rockstar Dundee. Ruffian had around 40 staff at the time, and its co-founder Billy Thompson was one of the original GTA designers. Dundee Culture reported that GTA VI is the first game in the series to involve all of Rockstar’s studios worldwide. That would make it the first GTA made partly in Dundee since 1999.
And GTA is only one part of the city’s record:
- Minecraft: Dundee’s 4J Studios brought the best-selling game of all time to consoles. When the Xbox 360 edition launched, it sold 400,000 copies in 24 hours. The studio, founded by Chris van der Kuyl and Paddy Burns, now employs more than 50 people and is building its own sandbox game, Reforj.
- Lemmings: still regularly named among the greatest games of all time, 35 years on.
- A studio for every taste: from Outplay and Tag Games to Ninja Kiwi Europe and a steady stream of graduate start-ups.
Round six: the university that rewrote the rules
In 1997, the year Grand Theft Auto came out, Abertay University launched the world’s first degrees in computer games. David Jones was instrumental in setting them up. Almost 30 years later, the 2026 Princeton Review rankings named Abertay the top international school for games design and the best in Europe. Its undergraduate games courses ranked fifth in the world.
Abertay also gave student developers something no other university could offer: a route to a BAFTA. From 2007 until the award was last presented in 2017, the BAFTA Ones to Watch award could only be won through Abertay’s Dare to be Digital competition. The competition lives on as Dare Academy, and this year’s winner was Finch Outside the Box for its game Loose Juice.
The talent pipeline is still busy. Last month, more than 50 developers spent a weekend at Abertay designing games that blind and partially sighted people can play, with those players in the room. It is a big part of why so many students choose to study in Dundee.
The scorecard
Dundee has around 40 games studios and, according to Universities Scotland, more games developers per head of population than any other city in the UK. Most of them are Abertay graduates. Across Scotland, the number of games companies has grown from 15 in 2010 to 130 in 2024, turnover has risen from £38.1 million to £340 million, and employment has more than doubled since 2015.
The next round is already being planned, with an up-to-£20 million creative tech hub at Camperdown Dock in the pipeline. When GTA VI goes live at midnight on 19 November, millions of players around the world will be playing a series that started in a Dundee computer club. Pound for pound, few cities anywhere can match that.
Sources
- Rockstar Newswire: Grand Theft Auto VI is now set to launch November 19, 2026
- TechRadar: GTA VI Trailer 2 watched 475 million times in 24 hours
- TweakTown: Trailer 1 Guinness World Record
- VGC: GTA VI could generate $1 billion from pre-orders alone
- ESPN: DFC Intelligence GTA VI forecast
- GameDev.net: GTA VI sales predictions
- GTA Boom: Edge preview details
- Pure Xbox: first hands-off previews roundup
- The Courier: Grand Theft Auto and Dundee, 25 facts
- bit-tech: Lemmings celebrates twenty years
- Film Stories: The chaotic origins of Grand Theft Auto
- Wikipedia: Rockstar North
- VGC: Rockstar takes over Ruffian Games
- Dundee Culture: GTA reportedly being produced in Dundee again
- DIGIT: 4J Studios opens Edinburgh office
- Abertay University: Princeton Review 2026
- MillionPlus: the only route to BAFTA Ones to Watch
- Abertay University: Dare Academy 2026 winner
- Universities Scotland: Abertay and Dundee games
- Scottish Business News: Scotland games sector growth
