Rockstar Vancouver

Rockstar Vancouver (formerly Barking Dog Studios), was a video game studio located in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia. Rockstar Vancouver released Bully, a controversial title for the PlayStation 2 on 17 October 2006. Rockstar Vancouver at one time employed 75 people.

On 9 July 2012, Rockstar Games announced that the studio would be closed in favour of merging the team with Rockstar Toronto at an expanded facility in Oakville, Ontario. The move was financially supported by the Government of Ontario.

Since the studio closed down, it is the second defunct company of Rockstar Games after Rockstar Vienna, which closed down 11 May 2006.

Rockstar Vancouver's last game was Max Payne 3, the sequel to Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

History
Barking Dog Studios founded in May 1998 by Glenn Barnes, Christopher Mair, Sean Thompson, Michael Gyori, Peter Grant and Brian Thalken, all former employees of Radical Entertainment. Barking Dog, with publishing assistance by Sierra Studios, moved on to produce an expansion to the 1999 PC Magazine Game of the Year Homeworld entitled Homeworld: Cataclysm. Homeworld had been developed by Relic Entertainment but Sierra chose instead to use Barking Dog to develop the game.

Barking Dog was also retained by Valve Software to develop the Beta-5 version beta of the popular first-person shooter Counter-Strike. Their legacy can be seen on the Counter-Strike map de_train where their cartoon dog logo can be seen on the side of a railcar.

Barking Dog also produced other games such as Global Operations, and Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon. They were acquired by Rockstar Games in August 2002, and became known as Rockstar Vancouver.

Many of Barking Dog's employees later split off to form their own companies, such as Slant Six Games, Big Sandwich Games, Hellbent Games, Kerberos Productions and Ironclad Games.

In 2003, Take-Two mentioned in their financial results that Rockstar Games was working on the Spec Ops franchise but in early 2005 the project was seemingly cancelled. It was later revealed that Rockstar Vancouver was the developer of the canned Spec Ops project with musician Josh Homme to develop the soundtrack for the game.