Dr Richard Wilson, CEO of TIGA, said: “This is a very sad day for Realtime Worlds, Dundee and for the Scottish and UK video games industry. Realtime Worlds is a fantastic company with an exceptionally talented team, management and board of directors.

"On behalf of the video games industry, TIGA would like to express its condolences to everyone at Realtime Worlds. We wish you the best of luck for the future.”

“Despite today’s terrible news, Dundee and Scotland remain good places to do games business. Scotland has some excellent universities and offers large numbers of extremely talented programmers, artists, producers, managers, designers, audio engineers and testers. TIGA, the trade association representing the UK games industry, will do everything in its power to champion and support the sector.”

Realtime Worlds was founded in early 2002 by David Jones (left) who had worked on the development of the original Grand Theft Auto series.

His company, Realtime Worlds had created the original Crackdown video game for the Xbox 360 which was nominated in five categories and won two, for Action, Adventure and Use of Audio at the 2007 British Academy of Film & Television Arts Video Game Awards (BAFTAS).

The company’s last ever title “APB: All Points Bulletin”, was a multiplayer online video game for Microsoft Windows that had been scrapped for consoles.