Jason Rubin

According to Game Industry International, "placing Jason Rubin at the company's helm was unquestionably a good move — the Naughty Dog founder has an enviable track record and quite rightly commands the respect of the industry —, but by the time he took the role, THQ's stock had already crashed and layoffs were well underway. The company was mortally wounded; Rubin's failure to resuscitate his terminally ill patient should not reflect in any way on his own talents and abilities".

During E3 2014 it was announced that Rubin joined Oculus VR, heading up the Oculus first-party content initiatives in Seattle, San Francisco, Menlo Park, Dallas and Irvine.

Jason Rubin (born 1970) is an American video game director, writer, comic book creator and Internet company founder best known for the Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series of games which were produced by Naughty Dog, the game development studio he co-founded with partner and childhood friend Andy Gavin in 1986. He was the president of THQ before its closure due to bankruptcy on January 23, 2013.

On 29 May 2012, Rubin joined the struggling video game publisher THQ as President, and was responsible for all of THQ's worldwide product development, marketing and publishing operations. At the time Rubin joined THQ, the company had laid off hundreds of its employees and the stock had lost over 99% of its value from its high.

In December 2012, THQ partnered up with The Humble Bundle Team at Wolfire Games to make the Humble THQ Bundle raising over 5 million dollars, much of it going to charity. Rubin donated over $10,000 to charity as part of the event.

Rubin also co-founded an Internet startup called Flektor with Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin and former HBO executive Jason Kay. In May 2007, the company was sold to Fox Interactive Media, which is a division of News Corp. Fox described the company as: "a next-generation Web site that provides users with a suite of Web-based tools to transform their photos and videos into dynamic slideshows, postcards, live interactive presentations and video mash-ups." In October 2007, Flektor partnered with its sister company, Myspace, and MTV to provide instant audience feedback via polls for the interactive MySpace / MTV Presidential Dialogues series with then-presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama.

Just days after making a controversial speech at 2004's D.I.C.E. Summit that criticized publishers for not recognizing and promoting talent responsible for creating games, Rubin publicly announced his departure from Naughty Dog.

Crash Bandicoot turned out to be an enormous success, and Sony used the main character as their unofficial PlayStation mascot for several years. Due to the impressive visuals which the developer was able to achieve from the PlayStation console, the game served as a quality benchmark that all other game developers aimed to match, and the series spawned three sequels by Naughty Dog selling over 26 million units. The series continues with other development teams, having sold more than 40 million units worldwide. ` After their success with Crash Bandicoot, Rubin and Gavin began working on Jak and Daxter, a franchise that sold 9 million units through the various Naughty Dog incarnations. The series continued with other developers and currently stands at 14 million copies sold worldwide. Before Jak and Daxter's release, Sony purchased Naughty Dog, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment America in 2001. As a result, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was developed exclusively for the PlayStation 2.

Rubin and Andy Gavin formed Naughty Dog in 1986. Later that year, they published their first game together — a budgetware title called Ski Crazed. In 1989, Rubin and Gavin sold their first game to Electronic Arts: a role-playing game called Keef the Thief.

In their 18 years running Naughty Dog, they created fourteen original games including Math Jam (1985), Ski Crazed (1986), Dream Zone (1987), Keef the Thief (1989), Rings of Power (1991), Way of the Warrior (1994), Crash Bandicoot (1996), Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (1997), Crash Bandicoot: Warped (1998), Crash Team Racing (1999), Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy (2001), Jak II (2003), Jak 3 (2004) and Jak X: Combat Racing (2005). Together these games have sold over 35 million units and generated over $1 billion in revenue.