While Rockstar Games is known best for the Grand Theft Auto series, Bully – its game about a juvenile delinquent student named James “Jimmy” Hopkins rising through the ranks of Bullworth Academy – is just as highly regarded by some. Many had hoped a sequel would be on its way, and although it has yet to happen, former Rockstar developers have revealed the details of the time they tried to make that dream come true.
Game Informer spoke to five of these former employees from Rockstar’s New England studio – the team that was actually working on Bully 2 in the late 2000s – and they shared why this game never… well… graduated and made its way into the world.
Rockstar Vancouver was the team behind the original Bully, but Rockstar New England was entrusted to work on this sequel. They were excited to prove themselves worthy as Rockstar had recently purchased them when they were still known as Mad Doc Software.
While they wanted to be the “golden child in the Rockstar thing,” it was hard to escape the shadow of Rockstar North – the main studio behind the Grand Theft Auto games.
“[Rockstar New England] wanted to be sort of the golden child in the Rockstar thing, but it’s really hard when Rockstar North was the one that was producing all the golden eggs at that time,” one developer says. “Living in the shadows of someone who casts a big shadow like Rockstar North, and trying to usurp that role, it’s really difficult and nearly impossible. But man, did they try. Oh, did they try.”
Prior to Rockstar’s acquisition of Mad Doc, the studio was approached to work on Bully: Scholarship Edition, which was a remaster of the original with new missions, characters, and items. Following their successful partnership, Rockstar purchased them in April 2008. The team was ecstatic.
“Rockstar itself […] you say, ‘I work at Rockstar,’ people were really in awe of that,” one former developer says. “It was nice to have some clout to a job. You know? I was excited to work on anything that they had, because most of the games that they’d churned out [had] been pretty golden.”
Unfortunately, the honeymoon period did not last long and the studio’s culture quickly changed. Not long after they became Rockstar New England, Rockstar’s vice president of development Jeronimo Barrera visited the studio and left some feeling a bit worried.
“One of the first red flags was when someone asked about hours and weekends and stuff like that,” the developer recalls. “Jeronimo’s answer was something to the effect of, ‘Well, we don’t work every weekend.’ He’s like, ‘For example, I’m not working this Saturday.’ The emphasis on the word ‘every,’ and then ‘this,’ were a little disquieting in their effect.”
In 2019, a report came out from Kotaku and revealed Barrera was described as “abrasive” and “volatile,” and one employee accused him of sexual assault. Barrera denied all the allegations.
Following that meeting, the studio was hard at work on finishing the PC version of Bully: Scholarship Edition, assisting with Grand Theft Auto IV’s two story expansions and Red Dead Redemption, and beginning work on a sequel to Bully. Despite some of the red flags, they couldn’t be more excited.
Bully 2 was positioned to “sit alongside Rockstar games of the time, such as Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption.”
“There was a lot of focus on character, very deep systems, seeing how far we could push that, and putting it up there alongside a GTA,” one developer on the project says.
Bully 2 was to be “bigger and deeper than that of the original game,” and there were roughly 50-70 people working on the project. While the game’s open-world map would not have been as large as GTA IV, its planned scope was to range “from the size of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s open world to ‘three times’ the size of the original Bully’s school map.”