Nationality British Occupation Video game designer | Name David Jones Role Programmer | |
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Similar People Sam Houser, Dan Houser, Leslie Benzies | ||
David Scott Jones (born October 1965) is a Scottish games programmer and entrepreneur who founded computer game companies DMA Design in 1987 (which became Rockstar North in 2002) and Realtime Worlds in 2002. Jones created Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, which both spawned many successful sequels. He also created the Crackdown franchise for the Xbox 360 and Xbox One consoles, and the open-ended massively multiplayer online game, APB: All Points Bulletin.
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Biography
David Jones' career started with the indie game Menace, which he developed himself under the company name DMA Design and released in 1988. The game sold 15,000 copies and earned him £20,000, which he used to buy a car. DMA Design expanded and went on to make a second game, Blood Money, which Jones saw as a "further development" of the concept used in Menace. DMA created a third game in 1991, Lemmings, which was commercially and critically successful, resulting in awards including winning European Game of the Year twice. Over the next two years Lemmings sold over 2 million copies, making Jones, 25 years old at release and married with a child, wealthy and famous.
DMA Design created several more games over the next few years, but Jones spent time developing an idea for a fighting simulator set in a city; after the release of Syndicate Wars (1996), the company revised the concept to set it in a "living city" and cross it with a driving game, resulting in the successful and controversial Grand Theft Auto, which in turn sparked an entire franchise. In 2012 Jones revealed that much of the controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto was engineered by their publicist. DMA Design was soon after acquired by Gremlin Interactive, starting a chain of purchases that resulting in the studio becoming Rockstar North. Jones stayed with the company through 1999 and Grand Theft Auto 2 before leaving.
In 2002 Jones founded Realtime Worlds, who developed Crackdown (2007) and APB: All Points Bulletin (2010). Despite receiving funding of $100m Realtime Worlds entered liquidation in 2010 after the disappointing critical and commercial reception to APB.
Jones was the keynote speaker for the World Cyber Games in 2004 where he said that he considered mainstream multiplatform gaming to be the next big thing, and for the 2009 Develop Conference in Brighton.
In 2012 David Jones started work on ChronoBlade, a Facebook action-RPG game, with Stieg Hedlund as part of San Francisco-based development team nWay.
In 2012 he co-founded Cloudgine, a games development company focusing on cloud computing. Cloudgine, along with Reagent Games, a development company Jones founded in 2014, led the development of upcoming Microsoft XBOX ONE title Crackdown 3.