Gordon Hall, founder of Rockstar Leeds, dies, 51

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

Hall founded Möbius Entertainment in Leeds, England, in 1997, which worked mainly on handheld games, including a Game Boy Advance version of Max Payne. Take-Two Interactive acquired the company in 2004, renaming it Rockstar Leeds in the process, with Rockstar co-founder Sam Houser saying the company’s work on the game Max Payne was impressive enough to want to bring them on board .

Rockstar Leeds, with Hall as president of the studio, became Rockstar’s laptop specialist, co-developing GTA: Liberty City Stories and GTA: Vice City Stories with Rockstar North. He has also helped port a number of other Rockstar games over the years.

Later, the studio spearheaded the development of GTA: Chinatown Wars for Nintendo DS – a game that we awarded with a 9.5 / 10 rating and went on to call one of the best games of all time for the laptop. We talked to Hall in 2009 about the game’s development and how Rockstar Leeds managed to fit a GTA city on the DS hardware.

Over the years, Hall has also supported the development of LA Noire, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games features table tennis and more. In 2011, Hall resigned from Rockstar Leeds, later joining Activision Blizzard Mobile as creative director.

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

Joe Skrebels is the Executive News Editor at IGN.