That's quite some game, boy

Scottish success story.

TALL, slim, pale, bespectacled and bejeaned (brown not blue), David

Jones appears the archetypal boffin. He's the boy next door who used to

spend hours inventing computer games in his bedroom and grew up to be a

millionaire.

Now when the Japanese techno-giant Nintendo wants someone to design a

game which will give their next step into technology world success, they

call David in Dundee. DMA Design is one of only two companies

commissioned to create for Nintendo's new Ultra 64 system. The other is

a similarly small company with a big reputation in Leicestershire. DMA

-- direct memory access -- is a computing term synonymous with high

speed and high technology, which makes it instantly memorable in this

particular world.

DMA has just joined forces with BMG. The Bertelsmann Music Group,

although the world's second-largest entertainment company -- behind Time

Warner --are less-known than their component companies such as the RCA

record label. They have announced a strategic partnership with DMA to

publish four new game titles for the IBM PC and the next generation of

game platforms.

''They are a huge company of music publishers and video publishers and

have now set up a division purely to handle games. What is good about

them is that they have said they will treat computer companies in the

same way that they treat their music companies. In other words, BMG take

a back seat. In the past we have sold our games to publishers and unlike

the book business it is the publisher's name which is pushed rather than

the author's. That is because it really was a sort of bedroom-type

activity -- a hobby market -- and we really could not do much. That is

changing now: developers are getting more clout, because it is the

quality of the games that determines if they sell. The market is

becoming very professional now,'' said Jones.

He is determined that his company will remain in Dundee where he was

born 29 years ago, but for practical as well as sentimental reasons. The

son of a Yorkshire father and Highland mother, he combines creativity

with canniness. His wife, Pamela, is a Dundee girl from an Italian

family. Their 18-month-old son has already been lined up by dad as one

of the company's envied ''playtesters''.

''Most of our staff are Scots. It is a definite policy of ours that we

recruit people who are Scottish and want to stay in Scotland and then it

is a big upheaval to move down south. Because we work on a project for

12-15 months, staff become a key part of it and we don't want to lose

them.

''None of the computer courses really produce the kind of people we

need, so we have to train them up for a year, but we are talking to

Abertay, the new university in Dundee who supply about 50% of our

programmers, about setting up a postgrad course where we will supply the

material. They are quite keen on us, but not so keen to mention that I

dropped out of their course to set up the business. It's not the best

advertisement for them,'' he admitted with a grin.

He attributes part of his success to the luck of being in the right

place at the right time. ''When I was at Linlathen High School, it was

one of the first to run a pilot course for O-grade in computer studies,

so I took that. Then I got an apprenticeship at Timex when they were

building Sinclair Spectrums, so that once again was perfect. I was there

for about three or four years which makes my background hardware not

software, which is actually very useful in running a computer company.

When Timex was having problems, I took voluntary redundancy and went to

the Institute of Technology to do a degree in software, because by then

I was interested in the software side.

''I found first year quite simple, because I had been through it all

before and I started writing programmes at home. With my redundancy

money, I invested in what was then a new system, a Commodore Amiga, and

I had some friends who were interested and we all used to dabble in

programming.

''It took me just over a year to write the first game, Menace,

collaborating (by post) with a chap down south who did the graphics, who

also had a Commodore Amiga at a time when not many people had them. We

sold between 5000 and 10,000, which for a new machine in those days was

very good.

''With my second game, Blood Money, I paid a few of my friends at

colllege to transfer it to their machines and it started to snowball.

When I dropped out then, I took on one person full-time, then when my

friends had finished the course, they started to join me as well. Since

then, we've built up the company from the profit we've made on the games

and it's just grown and grown. We have just taken on the 5000 sq ft

building next door, which used to belong to General Accident.

Eventually, I hope we will build our own custom-built place. We do a lot

of music work now and we need a sound-proof music studio.

''I admit, I would like to finish the course some time, now that I am

taking on all these graduates without having a degree myself. I'll have

to write a paper or something,'' he added.

The breakthrough came with Lemmings, a puzzle game in which the

players had to save the endearing, furry creatures from almost certain

death. It appealed to all ages and topped the games charts around the

world, selling more than three million copies. That degree of success is

elusive. A unicycle racing game recently aimed more for the

SuperNintendo teenage market has not been released in Japan yet because

the unicycle was brought to life by turning the seat into a face -- and

that concept apparently causes the Japanese some difficulty.

Jones estimates that 15% of games account for 85% of the turnover and

so concentrates his research on trying to come up with one of the big

ones. ''There is a huge difference between bringing out an average

game and bringing out a really original, good game and that's why we

have been so successful in the past. We have the recipe now for a good

game and so instead of jumping on the bandwagon and copying other good

games, which is what other people did with Lemmings, we want to try to

be there first. We normally have 12 people working on a game and we have

to do that to really elevate ourselves from people who are just

producing average games.

''We don't do particularly violent games, although kids like them and

they drive the market, but I am not someone who believes that games can

influence kids in any way. I think the argument that killing something

on a screen is going to make you more likely to kill in real life is a

silly argument.

''We start with the strategy and the environment and then try to come

up with characters to suit. It is normally very simple. I tend to look

for ideas from everyday life and one day one of the programmers was

using a drawing package and it had these small characters walking up a

hill and there was a big gun and it just blasted them when they got to

the top and you had about 50 of them trying to cycle away to escape

being blasted. Really it is something as simple as that and you start to

see a game in it.'' Deceptively simple.