Final DMA Logo

DMA changed logo almost every game for a long time, and only settled on this one, by Stuart Graham around 1996.

DMA's First Office

DMA's first location was a 2 room office above a baby shop.(This picture was taken by Steve Hammond when DMA was actually in residence.)

The Complete History of
DMA Design
By
Mike Dailly

Chapter 1
Pre-DMA to 1988
(in the beginning)

Part 1

Menace Loading Screen Mockup

DMA Design officially started sometime in 1987 with the beginnings of what was to become their first game; Menace, and ended on a high in 2000 with Grand Theft Auto 2. And what a ride it turned out to be!

On these pages we hope to detail as much as we are able; the history, the highs, the lows and give an insight into the very heart of DMA itself.

Since computer games have become mainstream, there are many places where information on games companies can be found. DMA is referenced everywhere on the web, but all that data comes from the games on the shelves - from playing the games and reading the manuals.

The DMA team in 1991

Because we were there before DMA existed, were part of it during the second golden age of gaming and gathered up some of the pieces at the very end, we can go under the surface.

Best of all are the unknown projects, ones that for different reasons never saw the light of day and of those there were many.

Wherever possible, original images and original mockups will be used for illustration, rather than simple screen grabs. This helps to show how final art was produced, and also gives an outlet for the huge amount of disks, documents, hard drives and sometimes video that had been hoarded away and forgotten about.

Old Logos

This Primary source material, as it's called, shows not only the thinking behind the art, but sometimes the process used to bring the creation to the screen. It is almost an electronic archaeological dig and inevitably will have large, seemingly empty, areas where artwork or program code had been lost to time and only memories remain.

Conversely, other sections, may seem bloated with the sheer richness of material available, and you can be sure that there is more to show than you're actually seeing here.

When the computer games industry was still in its infancy, and even before DMA Design was founded, Dave Jones started work on his first game from the comfort of his bedroom at his parents' house.

These humble beginnings saw the start of a company that would but quite literally rock not only the games industry, but the world; and make it a household name by the shear quality and originality of the work it produced. The game that started it all was; Menace.

GTA 2

GTA 2 was the last game produced by the original DMA before broke up after being purchased by Take2.

GORE

Gore for the Amiga was one of the many unfinished or "Temporarily shelved" projects by DMA.

Menace

This was Dave's first game, which he started at home in 1987.