Bully

Bully is an action-adventure game set in an open world environment and played from a third-person perspective. The game's single-player mode has the player control a high school student—teenage rebel, James "Jimmy" Hopkins. Throughout the story, Jimmy progresses through six chapters and through the ranks of various school groups; archetypes include Bullies, Nerds, Preppies, Greasers, Jocks and Townies. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story.

Missions reward the player with cash, new items, and increase/decrease the respect of certain groups. If a group holds Jimmy in high regard, they will act friendly towards him (and have the option of being hired as "bodyguards" or "muscle"); if a group despises Jimmy, they will attack him on sight. Outside of missions, the player can freely roam the game's open world, consisting of the fictional town of Bullworth, and has the ability to complete optional side missions.

Bully takes place in the fictitious town of Bullworth, situated in the New England region of the United States. After being expelled from seven previous schools, the game's protagonist, 15-year-old James "Jimmy" Hopkins, is sent to the town's prominent private boarding school, Bullworth Academy, for a year while his mother and her new husband go on their honeymoon. The school campus is designed in a neo-Gothic style, similar to private schools and colleges in the United Kingdom and New England, such as Fettes College in Edinburgh. The school itself is the game's primary setting, while the rest of the town is gradually unlocked as the story progresses.

Bullworth consists of four main districts: Bullworth Town, the commercial borough; Old Bullworth Vale, a suburb area where the town's mansions, beach, and funfair are located; New Coventry, a run-down, urban-poor borough consisting mainly of tenement housing; and Blue Skies Industrial Park, an industrial borough comprising factories, industrial buildings, the town docks, and a trailer park. There is also the Happy Volts Asylum, a psychiatric institute located between the Blue Skies Industrial Park and Bullworth Academy. Because the game's story spans an entire school year, Bullworth's appearance changes between chapters, most notably during the third chapter, which takes place around the Christmas season.

Bully was developed by Rockstar Vancouver and published by Rockstar Games. Dan Houser, Rockstar's vice president of creative, devised its premise and wrote the story with Jacob Krarup, drawing on his experiences at St Paul's School, London. When developing the characters, the team aimed at recreating the state of being a child, and making it enjoyable. Parallels were made between protagonist Jimmy Hopkins and Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye.

Both characters share a background of a difficult home life and being thrown out of multiple schools. Though the pompous school principal Dr. Crabblesnitch was originally introduced as the main antagonist, this role was later given to Gary Smith, a student who initially befriends Jimmy. Gary is described as a sociopath.

The PlayStation 2 version of Bully received "generally favorable" reviews, according to the review aggregator website Metacritic.

Robert Ashley of 1Up.com found Bully to be a fresh approach to the open-world genre because it departed from the crime stories associated with Grand Theft Auto; Bullworth in particular was deemed to be more accessible than the sprawling world of San Andreas. GameTrailers praised the town's distinctive residents and changing seasons, and welcomed the shorter journeys between objectives. IGN's Jeremy Dunham however found the repeated travel between mission locations excessive, and criticized the slow opening chapter and occasional bugs that prevented missions from progressing.

In November 2006, Michael Pachter, managing director of research for Wedbush Morgan Securities, predicted that Bully would not sell well enough over the upcoming holidays to warrant a sequel. However, when his prediction turned out to be untrue, Pachter apologized to Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive, calling the sequel a "possibility".

During the development of Bully: Scholarship Edition, Mad Doc Studios was acquired by Rockstar in April 2008 and renamed to Rockstar New England. As Rockstar New England, the studio finished off Bully: Scholarship Edition as well as assisted Rockstar's other studios in supporting the DLC content for Grand Theft Auto IV (2008), and in support of Red Dead Redemption (2010). Near the end of this period, Rockstar had greenlit early production on Bully 2 at Rockstar New England. A.