Today we sadly have to say goodbye to Gordon Hall, founder of Rockstar Leeds for the development of Grand Theft Auto Chinatown Wars, who passed away at the age of 51.
This is communicated by the Gamesindustry.biz site in a sad and short article dedicated to the developer, whose video game career began with the founding of Mobius Entertainment in 1997, for which he developed several titles dedicated to the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance portable consoles by Nintendo.
After launching the GBA version of Max Payne, Mobius was bought by Rockstar Games, becoming the Rockstar Leeds division, of which – in fact – Hall was the leader. With Gordon Hall, Rockstar Leeds has collaborated over the years in the development of other major Rockstar Games titles such as Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and GTA: Chinatown Wars.
In 2009, Hall was hired in 2009 by the San Diego division (also of Rockstar). Before taking on his last role, that of chief creative officer for Activision Blizzard Mobile, Hall had abandoned the world of development for a few years, dedicating himself to studies related to research on player psychology and the study of strategies for applying microtransactions to all internal video games.
Martyn Brown, business development at Five Aces Publishing and co-founder of Team17, said:
Gordon was simply brilliant to be around, incredibly motivating and ever positive. His pursuit of excellence was staggering and he formed a great, trusting bond with those who chose to work (hard) alongside him. As a close friend, he was truly inspirational and socially speaking a real energetic one-off who could endlessly entertain at the drop of a hat, holding everyone in the palm of his hand. Gordon will be very sadly missed.
