Not to be confused with David Jones of Mastertronic, author of the Magic Knight games: two British programmers of the same name, working in the same decade.
In January 1997 Edge sat in David Jones’s office in Dundee while his PR man explained that nobody at DMA Design wanted to talk about Lemmings. Jones was more measured. “We had to have a break for a while after Lemmings. Three years of hell.” Those three years, Edge noted, had shifted 20 million copies across 21 formats and paid for the nine new cars with DMA number plates in the car park. In the next building his team was working on a game about stealing cars, Grand Theft Auto. Jones started DMA as a student with an Amiga, and his studios made two of the best-known games of the 1990s and, later, Crackdown.
Fast facts
- Born: 1965, Dundee.
- Founded: DMA Design (1988), Realtime Worlds (2002), Cloudgine (2012).
- Programmed: Menace (1988), Blood Money (1989), Lemmings (1991).
- Ran the studio that made: Uniracers (1994), Grand Theft Auto (1997), Crackdown (2007), APB (2010).
From Timex to DMA
Jones grew up in Dundee, where the Timex factory assembled Sinclair’s computers, and joined it as an apprentice. “I was really lucky because where I lived in Dundee, Timex was the manufacturer of Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81 computers,” he said in 2018. When the factory ran into trouble he took voluntary redundancy and spent the money on an Amiga. RAZE noted in 1990 that “Dave Jones’s background lies on the Spectrum”.
He went to study at what is now Abertay University in Dundee, and wrote games while he was there. “I had my second game published when I was in the third year of my degree at the University of Abertay,” he told Edge in 1998. “I left to form DMA with the option to return to finish my degree if I wanted.” Someone who later helped run Abertay’s games course told him that was a bad move.
Menace and Blood Money
DMA’s first game, Menace, was a shoot-’em-up for Psyclapse, a label of Psygnosis, which advertised it in October 1988 as “a pure arcade game”. Blood Money followed in 1989 on the Amiga, Atari ST and Commodore 64. Jones also taught the craft in print: in February 1990 Amiga Format ran “The Menace Within”, in which he used Menace to show how an Amiga game is put together, from the vertical blank to the hardware sprites.
By the time RAZE visited in November 1990, Jones had decided not to write another game himself but to build up the company: to bring in outside programmers, expand the offices in Dundee and get DMA’s games onto consoles. His favourite machine at that moment was the Mega Drive.
Lemmings
Lemmings came out early in 1991, published by Psygnosis, with Jones credited for the programming. It grew out of an argument between two of DMA’s staff, Scott Johnston and Mike Dailly, about how small a sprite could be and still have character, and a few seconds of animation of tiny figures walking up a slope to be blasted by a gun. “It all happened in a day,” Jones told Edge. “I just thought – there’s a fun game in that.” The player saves the creatures by giving individuals jobs, such as digging or building. “Eight abilities is just about the right number,” he said in 1991. “Only six of those take effect straight away and two don’t.” The One gave it 96%.
The game’s success tied DMA to it for years: sequels, and conversion after conversion, until DMA sold the rights to Psygnosis. Jones came to dislike releasing a game on every format for its own sake. “It’s very hard to explain to publishers that sometimes games just don’t go across all formats well,” he told Edge, and Lemmings, he said, “didn’t translate particularly well to consoles”.
Nintendo and Grand Theft Auto
DMA’s work for Nintendo began with a piece of video compression for the Super NES, and led to Uniracers (1994) and the N64 game Body Harvest. In 1997 the studio had three games in development for BMG, among them Grand Theft Auto, whose project leader was Keith Hamilton. Jones worried that American players, who wanted “everything in 3D”, might dismiss its overhead view. BMG Interactive published it for the PC in 1997, and it started the series that DMA’s successor, Rockstar North, still makes. Edge later called Jones “one of the key creators behind the first Grand Theft Auto”.
DMA changed hands quickly after that. Gremlin Interactive bought it in 1997 and gave Jones a seat on its board; Infogrames bought Gremlin in 1999; and by the end of 1999 Take-Two owned DMA. Jones did not stay. In February 2000, Edge reported, “former DMA boss David Jones” joined Rage Software to set up new studios.
Realtime Worlds
At Rage, Jones ran the Dundee studio, Rage Scotland, which made the first-person shooter Mobile Forces and began a game called CarWars. When Rage cut back in 2002 he bought the studio out, with the help of the Psygnosis co-founder Ian Hetherington, and named it Realtime Worlds. It started with a core of 15 staff from DMA. CarWars became Crackdown, an open-city action game for the Xbox 360, released in February 2007. It sold more than 1.6 million copies, Edge reported, though insiders told the magazine that it needed a team of contractors brought in by Microsoft to finish it.
Realtime Worlds’ next game, the online multiplayer APB: All Points Bulletin, took years and more than $100 million of investment, and the company grew to more than 200 staff. APB launched in the summer of 2010 to what Edge called “unenthusiastic reviews”, and on 17 August 2010, six weeks after its release, Realtime Worlds went into administration. Edge reported that 200 developers lost their jobs. Former staff described Jones to the magazine as a creative leader who struggled with a team that size. “He has a dream and a vision, but isn’t a details person,” said Luke Halliwell, who worked on the company’s technology. “His style isn’t well suited to 200-person teams.” Everyone Edge spoke to, it added, called him “a thoroughly decent man”.
Later work
In 2012 Jones co-founded Cloudgine, an Edinburgh company that built technology for running game calculations, such as physics, on remote servers. It worked on Crackdown 3, released in 2019, and Epic Games bought Cloudgine in 2018 to fold its technology into the Unreal Engine.
Sources
- Edge issue 41, January 1997, pp. 52–58: DMA Design studio visit and interview with David Jones (“three years of hell”; 20 million copies across 21 formats; the car park; Keith Hamilton, project leader on GTA; Lemmings on consoles; “everything in 3D”; the Super NES video compression).
- Dean Takahashi, “Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones: You never know when you’ve got a hit idea”, GamesBeat, 9 July 2018 (web, secondary): Jones on Timex, as quoted in the Dundee games scene entry.
- Edge issue 58, May 1998: university games courses (Jones on his degree at Abertay).
- ACE issue 13, October 1988: Psyclapse advertisement for Menace. ACE issue 20, May 1989: Blood Money.
- Amiga Format issue 7, February 1990, p. 64: Dave Jones, “The Menace Within”.
- RAZE issue 1, November 1990: visit to DMA Design (Jones’s Spectrum background; building the company; the Mega Drive).
- The One issue 28, January 1991, pp. 46–50: Lemmings review (96%) and “The Art of Rodent Design” (team credits; Jones on the eight abilities).
- Edge issue 94, February 2001: Jones joins Rage, February 2000; pp. 134–137, “The making of… Lemmings” (Johnston, Dailly and the sprite argument; Jones on the animation, “there’s a fun game in that”).
- Edge issue 45, May 1997: Gremlin buys DMA; Jones on Gremlin’s board. Edge issue 71, May 1999: Infogrames buys Gremlin. PC Zone issue 83, December 1999: Take-Two buys DMA.
- Edge issue 211, February 2010: Realtime Worlds “founded by Dave Jones in 2002, with a core of 15 staff from his previous studio, DMA Design”.
- Edge issue 220, November 2010, “Realtime damage”: Rage Scotland, Mobile Forces and CarWars; the 2002 buyout with Ian Hetherington; Crackdown’s release and 1.6 million sales; the investment in APB; administration on 17 August 2010; 200 jobs; Luke Halliwell’s comments; “one of the key creators behind the first Grand Theft Auto”.
- “Cloudgine”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): founded in Edinburgh in 2012 by Dave Jones and others; Crackdown 3; bought by Epic Games in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudgine