Rockstar San Diego
 | |
| Formerly | Angel Studios, Inc. (1984–2002) |
|---|---|
| Type | Subsidiary |
| Industry | Video games |
| Founded | January 1984 |
| Founder | Diego Angel |
| Headquarters | , US |
| Key people |
|
| Products |
|
Number of employees | 128 (2011) |
| Parent | Rockstar Games (2002–present) |
| Divisions | RAGE Technology Group |
Rockstar San Diego, Inc. (formerly Angel Studios, Inc.) is an American video game developer and a studio of Rockstar Games based in Carlsbad, California. The studio is best known for developing the Midnight Club and Red Dead series.
The Colombian entrepreneur Diego Angel founded the company as Angel Studios in January 1984 after studying film in Chicago, where he had grown fond of computer animation. The studio began with a focus on animation and visual effects for multimedia productions, such as advertisements, films, and music videos. Notable works include the film The Lawnmower Man and the music video for Peter Gabriel's song "Kiss That Frog". Angel Studios began working in the video game industry during the 1990s, creating cutscenes for Ed Annunziata's Ecco: The Tides of Time (1994) and Mr. Bones (1996). The company fully developed games with Nintendo (Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest) and Microsoft (Midtown Madness and Midtown Madness 2), and it produced a port of Capcom's Resident Evil 2 for the Nintendo 64.
Rockstar Games was impressed with the studio's work on Midtown Madness and offered a long-term partnership in 1999, which resulted in the creation of the Midnight Club and Smuggler's Run series. The publisher's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, acquired Angel Studios in November 2002 and integrated it with Rockstar Games as Rockstar San Diego. Angel left the studio in May 2005 and returned to Colombia. Since 2004, Rockstar San Diego has operated an internal game engine team that develops Rockstar Games's proprietary Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, which is used in most of the publisher's titles. The studio led the development of further Midnight Club games, Red Dead Revolver (2004), Red Dead Redemption (2010), and its expansion pack Undead Nightmare. It collaborated with other Rockstar Games studios on Max Payne 3 (2012), Grand Theft Auto V (2013), and Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018).
History
[edit]Early years in animation (1984–1993)
[edit]_(cropped).jpg)
Wanting to become a film director, Diego Angel[a] moved from Medellín, Colombia, to Chicago in 1971, when he was in his early 20s.[4] He enrolled at Columbia College Chicago to study film and attended the Art Institute of Chicago.[4][5] During his studies, Angel grew fond of computer animation, describing computers as "the future of art".[4][6] In 1984, Angel moved with his wife and two children from Chicago to San Diego because he had friends and relatives there, and because the Spanish-language street names and proximity to Spanish-speaking Mexico made him feel at home.[4][5] He established Angel Studios as a work-for-hire animation studio in January 1984 in nearby Carlsbad.[2][4] Angel obtained a computer and an office but, within a few days, realized he could not run a business and be an art director at the same time, while also lacking the knowledge to operate the computers. He consequently hired an art director and a system operator.[4] Angel Studios did not find a paying client for its first six months in operation and garnered only US$5,000 (equivalent to $14,968 in 2025) in revenue in its first year.[5] Angel said he was "suffering" due to a scarcity of work in the company's first two years in business.[4] The company's first project was an educational video for the University of California, San Diego, followed by commercials for Nintendo, Polaroid Corporation, Asiana Airlines, and Cobra Golf, among others.[7][8] Other early projects were productions for NASA and Rohr Industries, as well as animated logos for Home Box Office and ESPN.[5]
After the first year, the brother-in-law of Angel's wife invested in the company, while Angel secured a bank loan.[5] In the second year, revenues reached $25,000 (equivalent to $73,429 in 2025) and by 1989, Angel Studios had six employees and $500,000 worth of equipment. To ensure key employees would remain with the company, Angel made three of them partners in March 1989.[5] Brad Hunt, Angel Studios's chief technology officer, and Michael Limber, the chief operating officer and later chief creative officer, were among the founding partners.[9][10][11] The company grew to twelve employees by February 1993.[7] Angel used a philosophy he called the "three P's" (passion, patience, and perseverance), which meant he would not accept every offer that came his way, choosing instead to only accept projects that showcased his team and its technology.[2] Studio employees said that Angel treated them like family: he paid them well, gave them plenty of vacation time, and occasionally shared a bottle of Patrón-brand tequila on Friday afternoons, an event he called "Sippy Wippy".[2][12]
Much of the 3D work produced by Angel Studios was for films and music videos.[2][13] Successes came with the computer-generated imagery and visual effects in the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man and the music video for Peter Gabriel's song "Kiss That Frog".[2][14] One of the two major scenes the studio produced for The Lawnmower Man is considered the first virtual sex scene.[15][16] For this project, the company's team consisting of Hunt, Limber, and Jill Knighton Hunt developed Scenix, a software set that provided a "visual programming language".[17][18] By March 1992, Angel Studios was working on a virtual reality game adaptation of its scenes from the movie.[19] The "Kiss That Frog" music video was part of a simulator ride exhibited in an 18-seat mobile theater, the Mind Blender, which went on tour in 1993.[20][21] The video received the "Best Special Effects in a Video" award at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards.[2][22] For The Enertopia Symphony, a 13-minute short film that was shown at the Electric Energy Pavilion at Expo '93, the studio produced a six-and-a-half-minute stereoscopic animation from live-action 3D photography directed by Peter Anderson.[23] It contracted the agency Spear/Hall & Associates to handle its marketing in August 1993.[24]
Entry into video games (1993–2000)
[edit]During the early 1990s, Angel Studios collaborated on tech demos for Silicon Graphics's high-end computers and received some of these computers in return. One of Silicon Graphics's clients was Genyo Takeda of Nintendo, who was impressed with Angel Studios's work. He met with the company and signed an agreement that made Angel Studios a partner for Nintendo's upcoming Nintendo 64 console.[2] The studio shifted its focus to video game development and Nintendo announced it as one of the studios on its "Dream Team" of external partners for the Nintendo 64 in February 1995.[2][22] Around this time, Angel consciously steered the studio away from "high-risk, capital-intensive" projects, even if they offered rich potential. Limber cited Angel's business decisions as the biggest factor in the company's survival of the dot-com bubble, which severely impacted the San Diego-area multimedia industry.[1] In retrospect, Angel said he never had a business plan or mission statement and made decisions by gut feeling.[4] Around this time, Angel Studios accepted game designer Ed Annunziata's pitch to create cutscenes for the Sega CD version of Ecco: The Tides of Time. Pleased with the result, Annunziata invited the studio to work on cutscenes for his next game, Mr. Bones for the Sega Saturn.[11] That game was released in 1996 with cutscenes and additional artwork by Angel Studios.[2][13]
I was the only company in video games, the only [American] studio in those days, that was working and getting along with the Japanese. Americans are kind of closed [off] ... When you're outside the United States, you're open to other cultures than the Americans ... I used to go every month to Japan and just bring six bottles of tequila. They loved it.
As part of Nintendo's "Dream Team", the company developed two sports games featuring the American baseball player Ken Griffey Jr.—Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. and Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest—released for the Nintendo 64 in 1998 and 1999, respectively.[1][25] Although critics praised both games, Angel decided against making further sports titles, declaring that Angel Studios was "not a sports company".[1] The studio continued its work for the Nintendo 64, collaborating with the Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto on a vehicular combat game titled Buggie Boogie.[26] Miyamoto issued three-month contracts to the company, not retaining any documents and returning every three months to check on the game's progress.[27] Angel Studios spent 45 days creating a "design bible" for its first meeting with Miyamoto, who rejected it and asked the studio to "find the fun" over the next three months.[4] The game would have seen vehicles consume each other, absorbing their DNA to obtain their powers.[26] After six to nine months, the title was canceled as Nintendo prioritized a prototype of Diddy Kong Racing.[27][28] Angel Studios was left with a "well-polished" tech demo it used to pitch its development services to other publishers.[28] Upon Miyamoto's request, the team began working on a fantasy golf game.[27]
In late 1997, Angel Studios was contracted to develop a port of Capcom's PlayStation game Resident Evil 2 for the Nintendo 64.[29] According to Angel, this was the first collaboration between Capcom and a video game company outside Japan.[2] The development had a budget of $1 million and the work was done in two years by nine full-time developers.[29][30] The port was released in November 1999 and was considered a success: The studio condensed the game's data to less than 10% of its original size, fitting the original version's two compact discs onto a single Nintendo 64 cartridge.[29][31] In a 2018 retrospective on Resident Evil 2 and its ports, Eurogamer's John Linneman called the conversion "one of the most ambitious console ports of all time".[31] Matt Casamassina of IGN opined the port marked the studio as fit to develop for Nintendo's recently announced Project Dolphin console, which became the GameCube.[32] Angel attributed much of his company's early video game success to his good relationships with Asian publishers.[2]
Another Angel Studios project was Ground Effect, a hovercraft racing game that was due to be published in February 1998 by Inscape before it was acquired by Graphix Zone in February 1997.[33][34] Angel Studios's film Oceania was exhibited at the Virtual Reality Pavilion of Expo '98.[35] The studio contributed to an adventure ride called Virtual Jungle Cruise, which debuted at the June 1998 opening of the first DisneyQuest interactive theme park in Orlando, Florida.[36] Interactive Light published Angel Studios's beat 'em up-style arcade video game Savage Quest in 1999.[37] Around this time, Angel proposed the development of a racing game despite market saturation.[1] He encouraged his employees to work independently and take ownership over the game's individual parts. This policy was considered a major factor in the game's resulting quality.[38] The game was released as Midtown Madness in May 1999 as part of Microsoft's Madness racing game franchise.[39] Fred Marcus, a designer and programmer on the project, stated the studio's impressive physics demos were key to its publishing contracts.[40] The game was followed by Midtown Madness 2, developed by Angel Studios and released in 2000.[41] The studio continued working with Microsoft on a game involving a virtual girlfriend, planned as an Xbox launch title called XGirl.