Rockstar Leeds founder Gordon Hall dies at 51

Gordon Hall, who founded the studio that would become Rockstar Leeds – and worked on such as Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, and LA Noire – has died at the age of 51. As reported by GamesIndustry, members of the The Yorkshire development scene started discussing the news today. No cause of death was announced at the time of writing.

Hall founded Möbius Entertainment in 1997 in Leeds, England, working mainly on hand games, including a Game Boy Advance version of Max Payne. Take-Two Interactive acquired the company in 2004 and renamed it Rockstar Leeds. Sam Houser, co-founder of Rockstar, says the company’s work on the Max Payne game was impressive enough to bring them on board.

Rockstar Leeds, with Hall as studio president, became Rockstar’s hand specialists and, along with Rockstar North, developed GTA: Liberty City Stories and GTA: Vice City Stories. It has also helped carry a number of other Rockstar games over the years.

Later, the studio led the development of GTA: Chinatown Wars for Nintendo DS – a game that gave us a 9.5 / 10 rating and is one of the best games ever on the PC. We spoke to Hall in 2009 about the development of the game and how Rockstar Leeds managed to fit a GTA city into the DS hardware.

Over the years, Hall has also presented the development of LA Noire, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games, Table Tennis and more. In 2011, Hall resigned from Rockstar Leeds, and later joined Activision Blizzard Mobile as chief creative officer.

All of us at IGN express our condolences to Hall’s family and friends.

Joe Skrebels is IGN’s editor – in – chief of News.