David Crane (programmer)

David Crane (born in Nappanee, Indiana, United States) is a video game designer and programmer.

Crane started his programming career at Atari, making games for the Atari 2600. After meeting up with co-worker Alan Miller in a tennis game, Miller discussed with him a plan he had to leave and found a company that would give game designers more recognition. From this meeting, he left Atari in 1979 and co-founded Activision, along with Miller, Jim Levy, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan. His games have won many awards while he was at Activision. At Activision, he is best known as the designer of Pitfall!, a game that stayed at the top of the charts for 64 weeks. He used to have a personalized license plate that had Pitfall as the letters on it.

Crane maintained that the Atari policy of relying on mangled adaptations of arcade games would result in a glut of cheap, unappealing games (which was one of the contributing factors to the Video Game Crash of 1983), while instead considering the strengths and weaknesses of the 2600 machine and tailoring new games to them would have yielded positive results. The reasoning was that while the new games would have lacked the instant-promotion of an already-known name, word of mouth among video gamers, being a young and highly-social group, would have gradually made up for it if the game was good.

In 1986, Crane left Activision to co-found Absolute Entertainment with Garry Kitchen. The two of them left mainly because of Jim Levy's departure, and the way the newly appointed CEO of Activision, Bruce Davis, treated video games more like commodities rather than creative products. Although Crane worked for Absolute, he did all of his programming at his home in California. For Absolute Entertainment, he was known for A Boy and His Blob, a successful NES title following the adventures of the protagonist and his companion, a shape-shifting 'blob', and Amazing Tennis. In 1995, Absolute Entertainment was dissolved, and became a defunct company.

In 1995, he co-founded Skyworks Technologies and currently is that organization's Chief Technical Officer.

Selected titles

Year	Title	Company
1978	Outlaw	Atari
1979	Canyon Bomber	Atari
1981	Freeway	Activision
1982	Pitfall!	Activision
1984	Pitfall II: Lost Caverns	Activision
1984	Ghostbusters	Activision
1985	Little Computer People	Activision
1989	A Boy and His Blob	Absolute Entertainment
1990	The Rescue of Princess Blobette	Absolute Entertainment
1994	Night Trap	Digital Pictures

External links

• David Crane's profile at MobyGames
• Legends of the C64 article on David Crane and Activision
• Meet David Crane: Video Games Guru magazine interview from 1983
• The Dot Eaters article featuring Crane, Pitfall! and Activision
• "Playing Catch-Up: 'A Boy And His Job: Activision's David Crane'", interview with Crane on Gamasutra