Rockstar Lincoln
British video game developer
Rockstar Lincoln Limited (formerly Spidersoft Limited and Tarantula Studios) is a British video game developer based in North Hykeham. It is the quality assurance and localisation studio of Rockstar Games. Steve Marsden and David Cooke founded the company as Spidersoft in May 1992. It initially developed Game Boy and Game Gear ports of various games, including several pinball video games for the publisher 21st Century Entertainment, which acquired the studio in 1995. Following 21st Century Entertainment's shutdown in 1998, Spidersoft was sold to Take-Two Interactive and renamed Tarantula Studios. The studio continued working on Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, including Grand Theft Auto (1999). In 2002, the development arm of Tarantula Studios was shut down and its quality assurance portion integrated with Take-Two's Rockstar Games label as Rockstar Lincoln.
History
Early years and pinball games (1992–1998)
Rockstar Lincoln was founded as Spidersoft by Steve Marsden and David Cooke. They had previously worked together in the computer chip manufacturing department of GEC-Marconi from 1982 until 1984, when they turned to game development. They created the ZX Spectrum game Technician Ted, which was published by Andrew Hewson's company Hewson Consultants in 1984.
“Rockstar Lincoln” enters the record as british video game developer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rockstar, Lincoln and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1831780. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1992, 1995, 1998 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rockstar Lincoln” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.