Jason Rubin

Jason Rubin is a video game developer and executive who co-founded the game studio Naughty Dog with Andy Gavin and co-created the Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter series. From 2014 to 2026 he led content and games work at Oculus VR and its parent company Facebook (renamed Meta Platforms), starting as head of worldwide studios and later holding vice president titles for content, play and the metaverse.

At Oculus he managed the first- and second-party content programs for the Oculus Rift, including its launch lineup, and announced the closure of Oculus Story Studio in 2017. His later responsibilities covered gaming on Facebook Portal, Messenger and Facebook's cloud gaming service as well as Quest, and in his final years at Meta he spoke publicly about the company's Horizon platform, which includes Horizon Worlds. He left Meta in March 2026.

Reviewed 11 October 2026. Checked every date, title, figure and quote against the cited UploadVR, GamesMarket, TechCrunch, Road to VR, Game Developer, GamesBeat, Computerworld, MCV and AWE pages, the Oculus blog posts, the Sony press release of 22 January 2001 and the Gale entry, and confirmed no new role after Meta has been announced. About review dates.

Early life and education

Rubin and Andy Gavin were friends from the age of twelve and sold their first game when they were sixteen, according to the entry on Rubin in the Gale reference series Authors and Artists for Young Adults. That game, the skiing title Ski Crazed, was sold to the publisher Baudville for $250. The same entry states that Rubin attended the University of Michigan.

Career

Naughty Dog

Rubin and Gavin's company was first called JAM Software. Sources differ on its founding year: UploadVR dates it to 1984, while the Gale entry gives 1985. The pair renamed the company Naughty Dog, Inc. when they signed with Electronic Arts for Keef the Thief (1989). After an offer from Universal Interactive Studios (UIS) in 1993, Rubin went to Boston, where he and Gavin created Way of the Warrior; on the strength of that game Naughty Dog signed a several-project contract with UIS and set up in Santa Monica, California.

Naughty Dog introduced the Crash Bandicoot franchise in 1996 and followed it with Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back, Crash Bandicoot: Warped and Crash Team Racing (1999); by January 2001 the four titles had sold more than 20 million units collectively. Andy Gavin credited the studio's success to its decision to focus on titles for the PlayStation. On 22 January 2001 Sony Computer Entertainment America announced that it had acquired Naughty Dog, whose entire 30-person team became a wholly owned subsidiary; Sony said the deal would let it create content with the studio "exclusively for PlayStation 2". The announcement named Rubin and Gavin as the founders and co-presidents and said they would continue to run day-to-day operations under the direction of Sony's Shuhei Yoshida. Rubin left Naughty Dog in 2004.

The Gale entry credits Rubin, with Gavin, on the following games:

Year	Title
1986	Ski Crazed
1988	Dream Zone
1989	Keef the Thief
1991	Rings of Power
1994	Way of the Warrior
1996	Crash Bandicoot
1997	Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back
1998	Crash Bandicoot: Warped
1999	Crash Team Racing
2001	Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy
2003	Jak II: Renegade

Flektor

Rubin co-founded Flektor, a website for real-time video and audio editing that let users make mash-ups and other user-generated clips. Based in Culver City, California, and founded in 2006, it was acquired by Fox Interactive Media, a division of News Corp., in a deal announced on 30 May 2007.

THQ

In May 2012 the publisher THQ appointed Rubin as its president, responsible for the company's worldwide product development, marketing and publishing and reporting to chairman and chief executive Brian Farrell. THQ was already in financial trouble and went bankrupt less than a year later. According to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, THQ terminated the employment of Rubin, Farrell and chief strategy officer Jason Kay "without cause", effective 30 January 2013.

Oculus

Rubin joined Oculus VR in 2014, a few months after Facebook announced that it was acquiring the company. According to a summary by Augmented World Expo (AWE) of his AWE USA 2025 session, he had found early VR systems underwhelming and it took some convincing when Brendan Iribe called him to look at Oculus, but trying the Oculus Rift DK1 convinced him that VR would be a powerful force. Oculus announced on 10 June 2014, ahead of E3, that Rubin had joined as head of worldwide studios and would lead its first-party content initiatives in Seattle, San Francisco, Menlo Park, Dallas and Irvine. The same post listed the titles at the Oculus booth that year, among them Lucky's Tale, EVE: Valkyrie, Superhot and Alien: Isolation. In a statement quoted by Game Developer, Rubin said: "I'm excited to bring together a new division dedicated to building high-quality VR content that helps define the platform and inspire others to do the same."

At Oculus Connect 2 in 2015 he presented the session The Early Days of VR Game Design: Lessons Learned, listed in the conference schedule under his title of Head of Studios. In June 2016 Oculus promoted him to Head of Content, overseeing the development and publishing of all its VR content and experiences, including games, videos, apps and Story Studio; Steve Arnold became head of Oculus Studios at the same time. UploadVR credits him with managing the first- and second-party content programs that produced the Rift's launch lineup, both for the Xbox gamepad that originally shipped with the headset and for the Oculus Touch controllers that followed eight months later.

After Mark Zuckerberg said at Oculus Connect in October 2016 that Facebook would spend another US$250 million on VR content, on top of the more than US$250 million it had already invested, Rubin told UploadVR: "he's saying we spent $250 million and we're going to do it again." He added that "in the future, dollars will get to impact in a much more efficient way" because the company was learning from its early investments. In an interview with Road to VR at Gamescom 2016, published in October 2016, he defended Oculus's funding of platform-exclusive games: "What we are doing now is the only way to viably jumpstart the market."

In May 2017, as Oculus VP of Content, Rubin announced that Oculus would "shift our focus away from internal content creation" and wind down Story Studio, its cinematic VR division. He said US$50 million of the company's committed funds would be set aside for investment exclusively in "non-gaming, interactive content".

Facebook and Meta

Rubin's title changed several times as Oculus was absorbed into Facebook and the company later renamed itself Meta. UploadVR lists him as Facebook's VP of AR/VR Content & Partnerships in 2018, VP of Special Gaming Initiatives in 2019, VP of Play in 2020, and VP of Metaverse Content / Creative in 2021. In these roles he became responsible for gaming on Facebook Portal, Messenger and Facebook's cloud gaming service, in addition to Quest.

As VP of Play he led the cloud streaming service that Facebook added to Facebook Gaming in October 2020. In a blog post he wrote that it was "critical for us to start with latency-tolerant games", and in an interview with Protocol he said: "Nobody is banking on cloud processing making standalone VR headsets viable." Speaking on a panel at the online GDC Showcase in March 2021, he pointed to the growth of Quest app revenue as evidence that big-budget VR games would follow, saying that "the trajectory of the path is clear: we're going to get there."

AWE's speaker listing for AWE USA 2025 gave his title as VP, Metaverse Experiences at Meta; he took part in a fireside chat on the main stage of AWE USA 2025 on 11 June. AWE's October 2025 summary of that session describes him as leading Meta's Horizon platform, "including the virtual world's vision and execution", and calls Horizon relatively sparsely populated. According to the summary, Rubin argued for a balance of openness and structure, such as themed social areas or predefined games, so that users know what to do in a virtual world, and the roadmap included using AI, such as 3D asset libraries and building through prompts, to reduce friction in creation.

Departure from Meta

Rubin announced on LinkedIn in early 2026 that he would leave Meta in March. GamesMarket, which reported the announcement on 2 February 2026, gave his title as VP Metaverse Experience. In his statement Rubin wrote: "I'm incredibly proud of multiple eras of my work at Meta." He cited building the Oculus Content team, which he described as Meta's first content production and developer relations organization, and the Metaverse Creative Team. UploadVR reported on 12 March 2026 that he had left after 12 years. His stated reason was to photograph wildlife ("I am going to chase animals with a camera"); he called the decision "difficult" and said he had "nothing but deep appreciation" for Meta's leadership.

UploadVR noted that he had been the second-longest-serving executive from the 2014 era of Oculus still at Meta, after Michael Abrash, and that his departure came two months after Meta closed three of its acquired VR game studios, made significant layoffs at a fourth and cancelled the sequel to Batman: Arkham Shadow. Rubin himself did not connect his departure to those changes.

See also

• Oculus Studios
• Oculus Story Studio
• Brendan Iribe
• Reality Labs