Jones met
Alex Seropian in his second year at the
University of Chicago. In 1991 Seropian had founded
Bungie and published his own game,
Operation: Desert Storm. Seropian was looking for another game to publish, and they decided to work together to finish
Minotaur. While Seropian did design and marketing, Jones finished the programming.
Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete shipped in April 1992; Bungie focused on the Mac platform due to familiarity with the platform and ease of use. "The PC market was really cutthroat, but the Mac market was all friendly and lame. So it was easier to compete," Jones said.
Pathways was successful enough that Bungie moved from a one-bedroom apartment to an actual office. which was also released for
Microsoft Windows. The
Marathon series was followed by a series of
real-time tactics games, starting with
Myth: The Fallen Lords in 1996.
Blam! evolved from a real-time strategy game to a third-person shooter to a
first-person shooter called
Halo: Combat Evolved. Jones role in development was unlike
Marathon and
Myth, where Jones was involved in developing more than half the levels and much to most of the story. Instead, he was the project lead and a manager, barely providing any code to the game. He would read war journals by authors such as
John Kinkead and
Winston Churchill. Around the same time, a glitch in versions of
Myth II was found to entirely erase a player's
hard drive; this led to a massive recall of the games right before they shipped, costing Bungie nearly one million dollars. Composer
Martin O'Donnell said that this recall created financial uncertainty in the studio, though accepting the offer was not something "Bungie had to do." Jones and Seropian refused to accept Microsoft's offer until the entire studio agreed to the buyout. Jones led the development team that created its sequel,
Halo 2, and served as director on a new video game series,
Destiny. He was listed in
Next Generations top 100 Developers in 2006 and 2007. After the release of
Halo 2, Jones took a sabbatical from Bungie, not knowing whether he wanted to continue making games. As Jones returned, his involvement with Halo began to diminish, He desired to build a new intellectual property. Jones worked closely with colleague
Jaimie Griesemer who was working on his own internal project named "Dragon's Tavern" which Griesemer described to be a "third person fantasy game" In the end however, Jones had the most power at Bungie, despite not being the President he was the majority share-holder and his vision of the studio was his alone to decide. Ultimately, Jason got his way with the studio's next project and worked with Griesemer to combine his ideas of "Dragon's Tavern" with what would be
Destiny. As development continued, and with Griesemer gone, the writing team led by
Joseph Staten had created a "Super-Cut" which was essentially a summary of the game's story-line. The super-cut was poorly received by Jones and the rest of the studio. Shortly after, Jones decided to scrap the writing team's work and effectively re-write the story very late into production with
Marty O'Donnell, believing it was not feasible and almost impossible to complete. Knowing the game was in peril with his proposed reboot of the story, Jones formed a group called the "Iron Bar" composed of art director Christopher Barrett, designer
Luke Smith and writer Eric Raab, an experienced book editor. Jones and the rest of Bungie carried on to release
Destiny on September 9, 2014. ==References==