DMA opens its first office above a Dundee baby shop
A red and green building at the bottom of Perth Road, £4,000 salaries, and the room where Lemmings would be born
Quick facts
- Location
- Bottom of Perth Road, Dundee, above a baby shop
- Landlord
- Jones's father-in-law-to-be, owner of the Deep Sea chip shop
- First employee
- Mike Dailly
- Early team
- Dave Jones, Mike Dailly, Russell Kay, Gary Timmons, Scott Johnston
- First paycheck
- £272 (about £4,000 a year)
- In progress there
- Blood Money finish, Ballistix ports, Walker
- Born there
- The argument that spawned Lemmings
What happened
Around April 1989, Dave Jones asked Mike Dailly whether he would come and work for him if he got an office. Dailly, who had been programming at home since he was about thirteen and had just been pushed out of college, was ecstatic. The office came through family: Jones's father-in-law-to-be owned the Deep Sea chip shop and restaurant in town, along with an odd red and green building across the road, above a baby shop at the bottom of Perth Road. Inside it, Russell Kay set about deciphering the Ballistix source code for a PC port while Dailly, who had spent three days straight formatting its thirteen thousand lines to make them readable, handled the C64 version. Gary Timmons, a friend of Kay's, came in to play with Deluxe Paint, replicated a walker animation using nothing but dots, and was offered a job as an artist in the back room; Scott Johnston arrived freelance from a stint at McDonald's to draw Walker graphics. At the end of August, Dailly's first paycheck arrived: £272, on a salary of about £4,000 a year.
Why it matters
This scrappy office is where DMA stopped being one man's project and became a studio. Nearly everyone in the room shaped what came next: the animation experiments by Timmons and Johnston fed directly into the argument that spawned Lemmings, and the Ballistix ports taught the team to ship across platforms. The setting says everything about the era: the studio behind Grand Theft Auto formed above a baby shop, paying four-figure salaries.
How we know
Two first-hand accounts agree and complement each other. Mike Dailly's history supplies the family connection, the baby shop, the hires, and his £272 first paycheck; co-founder Steve Hammond independently places the first office at the bottom of Perth Road, a small red-fronted place above a shop. Dates are approximate: the office came together between the April job offer and the end-of-August paychecks.
Sources
- Mike Dailly. The Complete History of DMA Design, Chapter 2 Part 3 (first-hand, archived) · Reputable sourceweb.archive.org · The domain "web.archive.org" is on our Reputable source registry.
- Mike Dailly. The Complete History of DMA Design, Chapter 2 Part 4 (first-hand, archived) · Reputable sourceweb.archive.org · The domain "web.archive.org" is on our Reputable source registry.
- Mike Dailly. The Complete History of DMA Design, Chapter 2 Part 2 (first-hand, archived) · Reputable sourceweb.archive.org · The domain "web.archive.org" is on our Reputable source registry.
- Steve Hammond. About DMA Design (co-founder's first-hand account) · Unverified sourcestevehammond.org · Cited as a "website" source (no stronger domain match).
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