Ian Lane Davis founded the company as Mad Doc Software in November 1999 after working as a technical director for Activision.

Mad Doc developed Star Trek: Legacy for Bethesda Softworks and Bully: Scholarship Edition for Rockstar Games.

[1] He later attended Phillips Academy until 1987, graduated from Dartmouth College with majors in mathematics, English, and computer science in 1991, and obtained a doctorate in artificial intelligence and robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996.

[1][2][3] Davis landed his first job with the video game company Activision in Santa Monica, California, acting as a technical director from 1996 to 1999.

[7] Mad Doc's first projects were development support on Star Trek: Armada and additional programming and art for Call to Power II, both released by Activision.

[8][9] In 2000, the studio relocated to neighboring Lawrence, first occupying "cramped, temporary quarters" before it moved into 6,600 square feet (610 m2) of renovated office space on the fifth floor of the Everett Mills.

[1][10] Mad Doc was the first video game company in Lawrence, and Davis hoped its presence would attract more in the future, which ultimately did not happen.

[10][11] Nine months after its founding, Mad Doc had grown to employ ten people and began contacting publishers for development projects.

[17] While the expansion received mixed reviews when it was released in September 2002, Mad Doc remained the principal developer of the Empire Earth series.

[1][35] Davis stated that the studio would remain in Andover because it was his "favorite place", where he lived with his wife Vicky and was planning to raise his children.

[1][2] Shaun McDermott, while chief financial officer of the studio, regarded the location as an asset because of the wide range of lifestyles that employees could live in nearby communities.

[1] Around this time, Mad Doc created maps for the multiplayer mode of Turok, which was developed by Propaganda Games and released in February 2008.

Some employees "felt they were expected by other people within the company to prove their dedication to Rockstar through long hours, and that they would be 'harassed' when trying to leave the studio".

[18] In June 2009, Rockstar New England laid off approximately 10% of its staff, including several artists and the entire quality assurance (QA) department.

The team envisioned a small open world with high interactivity, such as actions towards non-player characters (NPCs) having long-term consequences and every building being enterable, including by force.