Dave Jones, creator of the original Grand Theft Auto, and Robert Purchese of Eurogamer.
Dave Jones, creator of the original Grand Theft Auto, and Robert Purchese of Eurogamer at Gamelab 2018.
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Grand Theft Auto creator Dave Jones: You never know when you’ve got a hit idea

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 23 min

Since cofounding DMA Design in 1987, Dave Jones has created video games that have become massive franchises, including Lemmings, Grand Theft Auto, Crackdown, and APB: All Points Bulletin.

Few people have had such hits as Jones, who most recently founded Cloudgine, a cloud-based game engine company, and sold it to Epic Games earlier this year. But in a recent discussion, Jones confessed that it’s very hard to know whether the game you’re working on is going to be a hit or not.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.