Oculus VR Has Hired Jason Rubin, A Naughty Dog Co-Founder, To Lead First-Party Game Development

Oculus VR today confirmed that it has hired Jason Rubin to lead first-party game development. This comes less than a week after the company announced that it has poached Jason Holtman from Valve to lead the creation of a platform for selling virtual-reality experiences.

Best known for his work as co-founder at Naughty Dog, Rubin served as director on every title in both the Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter trilogies, the definitive adventure games of the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, respectively.

At Oculus, he will lead game development projects coming from studios in Seattle, San Francisco, Menlo Park, Dallas and Irvine.

These hires are just the latest to demonstrate that Oculus is looking to become far more than the maker of a peripheral for enabling virtual-reality experiences. In its post announcing Holtman’s arrival, the company also listed more than a dozen hires it’s made in recent months from big-name studios like 343 Industries (the developers currently in charge of the Halo series) and Valve, the company behind the Half-Life series and the Steam gaming platform.