Gary Penn

Gary Penn is a former British games reviewer who wrote for Zzap!64 in the 1980s and is a video game industry veteran. He later was editor of The One from 1988 to 1990 and was Creative Director at DMA Design where he supervised the release of the first Grand Theft Auto game in 1997. Penn has described the game as taking years to develop and almost being cancelled.

Penn's first job in the games industry was as a freelance producer for Konami where he worked on a Batman licensed game and David Braben's Frontier.

Penn won the Games Media Legend award in 2007.

As of September 2011, he is Head of Development at Denki. Penn claims his magazine background helped him setting up a "Hollywood-style" studio system there:

"It is something that was born of having a magazine background," he explains. "You don't have slippage, you're doing the same thing 12, 13, 14 times a year, so you get more practiced. It's like the notion of repertoire in the theatre, you have these tools, these methods of doing things, whereas in the game development business we always seem to be re-inventing the wheel."