GTA Creator Receives Copyright Strikes From Rockstar

According to rumors, Rockstar Games has claimed copyright strikes on two films created by the original developer of Grand Theft Auto, Mike Dailly. In the videos, Dailly displayed older development materials.

The software engineer, who was also one of the founders of DMA Design, stated the following in a tweet:

I see Rockstar are going full fuckers mode again, issuing copyright strikes to any GTA video they can find – including both my prototype videos. So now they’re trying to block all release of anyone’s work on a game – and any old development footage.

The video in question demonstrated one of the earliest builds of Grand Theft Auto, which was developed in the middle of the 1990s by Dundee-based DMA Designs, at a time when the Lemming’s series was still DMA Designs’ primary source of notoriety.

The documentation of the development process that went into the making of Grand Theft Auto is extremely scarce; nevertheless, in recent years, several of the original developers who were at DMA in the beginnings of the series have published some behind-the-scenes development films. Despite the fact that Dailly’s tweet is the first noteworthy public acknowledgment of this matter, the claim that Dailly is making shows that Rockstar is now targeting those videos.

In the vids that were pulled down, there was a prototype from 1994 for the first Grand Theft Auto game, which was launched in 1997, as well as a prototype for the rotating isometric aspect of the game. Copyright strikes have been used in the past by Rockstar and the publisher Take-Two to delete a large number of Grand Theft Auto mods. Take-Two filed a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against a modder named Luke Ross in July of this year. Ross was responsible for making Grand Theft Auto and other Rockstar titles compatible with virtual reality headsets.

After what was rumored to be a change in policy by Take-Two in 2021 about the kind of Grand Theft Auto mods that were permitted, a number of other popular mods were removed from the game. Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two, has claimed in the past that the firm is “very flexible” in regards to the issuance of DMCA takedowns.