Dave Jones says developers cannot reliably know in advance whether a game will become a hit. In an edited 2018 GamesBeat transcript of his Gamelab conversation with Robert Purchese, Jones recalled how Lemmings grew from a tiny animation and how players helped steer the original Grand Theft Auto toward its criminal fantasy. In both cases, the idea took shape through creative decisions and player response—not a dependable formula for success.
When did Dave Jones know Lemmings was a hit?
Jones traced the idea for Lemmings to an animation made by Mike Dailly: a small character walked up a hillside toward a turret. Jones wondered whether a player could change the character’s route and stop it from walking into danger. The game’s distinctive premise began with that practical design question, not a forecast of commercial success.
Early reactions were encouraging, Jones recalled, but he said the team had no reliable way to know how far the unusual concept would go. “But it’s always difficult to know if something is going to be a hit,” he said. The clearest sign came at launch: Jones remembered Psygnosis sending him hourly sales updates and said the game sold more than 100,000 copies on its first day.
Success also brought work that was less creatively appealing. The GamesBeat transcript says Lemmings had to be ported to more than 20 formats, a demanding task Jones did not consider core creative work. His recollection shows that a game’s early idea, its reception, and the practical labor required to sustain it are separate parts of a career.
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How did players change the original Grand Theft Auto?
Jones described the early concept as Race and Chase, a city simulation in which players could take the role of police or criminals. The team’s expectations shifted when players showed more interest in stealing cars and seeing what the city would do in response. As Jones put it, “Nobody liked playing the good guys.”
That response helped move the game toward the criminal fantasy that defined the original Grand Theft Auto. The design developed iteratively: player actions prompted reactions from the city, including alarms and emergency services. Jones recalled wanting the world to recognize what the player was doing: “Everything was about — I want everything to react to what I’m doing and recognize it.”
Jones said the first Grand Theft Auto remained in the top-ten charts for 12 months. He presented that sustained chart presence as evidence of the game’s success after release—not proof that the team could have predicted its staying power beforehand.
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Why did Jones move on to Crackdown and APB?
Crackdown: a different kind of open world
Jones said he wanted to move on from Grand Theft Auto after a few iterations because he preferred making new things rather than repeating the same game. He described Crackdown as combining an open city with platforming, progression, and vertical exploration—an effort to innovate from the ground up rather than simply continue an established formula.
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APB: ambitions constrained by the era
In hindsight, Jones pointed to the costs and constraints surrounding APB. The interviewer described the game as having spent five years in development before release; that timeframe belongs to the interviewer’s question. In the exchange, the interviewer also referred to battles involving 100 players, and Jones confirmed that figure.
Jones recalled that supporting the game’s large online ambitions meant buying physical servers and arranging data-center hosting. He also saw boxed-game distribution as limiting room to experiment. His view was that cloud infrastructure and an early-access approach might have suited the game better. Those are Jones’s retrospective judgments about how the project might have fit a different technology and distribution environment, not a definitive independent postmortem.
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He said he did not regret taking risks: “I never have any regrets about trying different things because we have to take risks in our industry.” That perspective links the setbacks and successes in his account without turning them into a guarantee that risk will pay off.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What advice did Jones give people starting in games?
Jones urged aspiring developers to build deep expertise in one part of game development that genuinely interests them. He connected that advice to the increasingly specialized roles and larger teams involved in making games:
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- Grand Theft Auto III: It all starts in Liberty City. With the revolutionary freedom to go anywhere and jack anyone, Grand Theft Auto III puts the center of the criminal underworld at your fingertips, if you have enough guts to take it.
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Welcome to the 1980s. From the decade of big hair and pastel suits comes the story of one man's rise to the top of the criminal pile.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Five years ago, Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson escaped the haze of Los Santos, San Andreas...a city tearing itself apart with gang trouble, drugs, and corruption.
Jones also discussed cloud technology, game streaming, esports viewing, artificial intelligence, and more dynamic worlds as areas of interest. Those comments express his views in the interview; they are not evidence that any particular technology has delivered the outcomes he anticipated.
What these stories do—and do not—show
The stories offer different examples of how a game can evolve: Lemmings began with a character walking toward danger, while Grand Theft Auto grew from a city simulation and player behavior. In Jones’s account, paying attention to what players did helped shape the games, but it did not make hits predictable. His experiences are a developer’s retrospective, not a universal formula or a systematic study of game success.
GamesBeat reported that the Grand Theft Auto series had sold more than 300 million copies in its article published July 9, 2018, and updated June 20, 2025. That is the figure reported in that article, not a current sales total. The feature is Dean Takahashi’s edited transcript of Jones speaking with Robert Purchese at Gamelab in Barcelona.
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