The small New York publisher that bought its way into Grand Theft Auto
Take-Two Interactive began in 1993 as a tiny publisher betting on video games that starred real actors, including Dennis Hopper. A few years later it scooped up the assets of a collapsing music-company games division, and with them came a Scottish studio working on a crime game. That studio became Rockstar North, and Grand Theft Auto made Take-Two a giant.
Ryan Brant founded the company with Mark Seremet in September 1993, after working for his father at an illustrated-book publisher and deciding to strike out alone. Its first real hit, Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller in 1994, used full-motion video with well-known performers and sold more than 300,000 copies, putting the company into profit. By around 1996 it was earning roughly US$10 million.
Brant wanted to grow by acquisition, so he took the company public in April 1997 on the NASDAQ. The shopping began almost immediately. In March 1998 Take-Two paid 1.85 million shares, about 16 percent of its stock, for BMG Interactive's assets, and in 1999 it bought DMA Design outright. It also bought distributors, including Jack of All Games, giving it a route to store shelves.
Grand Theft Auto III in 2001, followed by Vice City and San Andreas, transformed the business. By 2003 annual revenue had passed US$1 billion, up from a firm of 658 employees only two years earlier. In 2005 it spent more than US$80 million on developers, notably buying the sports studios Visual Concepts and Kush Games from Sega, which became the core of its 2K label. Firaxis, maker of the Civilization series, followed that November, and Irrational Games, then working on BioShock, joined around January 2006 for about US$10 million.
Today the company runs three big publishing arms, Rockstar Games, 2K and the mobile specialist Zynga, and it has also expanded into mobile through studios such as Socialpoint and Nordeus. As of April 2025 its stock market value was estimated at US$41 billion, placing it among the largest listed game companies in the world.
Source: Take-Two Interactive
