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As the original creator of Grand Theft Auto (a game he'd originally dubbed Race-n-Chase before the Houser brothers opted to give it an arguably more fitting name), David Jones can be quite easily credited with providing one of the biggest franchises in videogame history with a core tenet.
After scooting through his first year of collegiate coursework in his native Scotland, Jones decided to use his free time to begin building games, channeling the lessons learned in school into what would eventually become Lemmings for then-independent publisher Psygnosis (which would later be gobbled back up by Sony). Whipping up Direct Mind Access Design as a development house in 1989, he began cranking out a number of titles for the publisher, but it wasn't until he pitched what would eventually become the first GTA that he struck gold.
Though he left DMA Design about 10 years after forming it and just before GTA2 shipped, selling it to Gremlin Interactive (which was in turn bought by Infogrames) in the process, Jones hasn't really been hurting for ideas. He joined Rage Software as Studio Manager until Rage folded, then created Realtime Worlds in 2002 and quickly went to work fleshing out his own ideas for an open world playground that eventually became Crackdown, earning it a rather prestigious Best Debut Award at the 2008 Game Developers Choice Awards. His next title, All Points Bulletin, looks to take many of those early sandbox concepts online, though the release of the game has slipped a few times and the only confirmed platform as of now is the PC.
- Lemmings (1991)
- Grand Theft Auto (1998)
- Crackdown (2007)