Chris Crawford | Code Like It's 198x

“No great paintings were ever painted with crayons; no great symphonies were ever composed with kazoos; do you really think that you can write a great program in BASIC?” Chris Crawford put that question to would-be game designers in Computer Gaming World in March 1982, when he was an Atari employee with a hit wargame behind him. Two years later he published a book whose first sentence claimed that computer games were “a new and poorly developed art form”, and he spent the rest of his career arguing it: in magazines, in his own journal, at a conference he founded, and in games that few other publishers would have made. Some were commercial successes and some were not, and he usually said which was which himself.

Fast facts

Born: 1950, according to public reference sources.
Training: a master’s degree in physics from the University of Missouri; he taught physics and energy topics in Nebraska and California.
At Atari (1979–1984): Energy Czar, Scram, Eastern Front (1941), Excalibur, and most of the technical guide De Re Atari.
Freelance: Balance of Power (1985), Patton vs. Rommel (1987), Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot, Balance of the Planet (1990), Patton Strikes Back (1991).
Books: The Art of Computer Game Design (1984), Balance of Power (1986), Chris Crawford on Game Design (2003), Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling.
Founded: The Journal of Computer Game Design (1987) and the Computer Game Developers’ Conference (1988).

A wargamer with a computer

Crawford came to computers through board wargames. In 1974, he told Computer Gaming World, he met someone at the University of Missouri’s computer centre who was trying to computerise Avalon Hill’s Blitzkrieg: “I thought he was crazy, but I was curious”. His own game, written in FORTRAN on an IBM 1130, first ran in 1976 and became Tanktics. He moved it to a KIM-1 single-board computer and then to a Commodore PET, and sold it himself, “because there were no software publishers in those days”. The first copies went out on 30 December 1978, at $15 with a map board and counters. He sold about 150, and about 100 of his next game, Legionnaire, at $10. The author’s note in his 1984 book calls Tanktics “the first commercially available wargame”; that is his own claim.

He was teaching physics at the time. “I taught for money and programmed for fun,” he said. “In 1979 I made the startling discovery that it is far more lucrative and enjoyable to teach for fun and program for money.” His wife’s new job took them to California, and after a headhunter turned him away for lack of professional experience, she looked up “Computer Games” in the phone book and found Atari. He was hired, he later learned, for the job the headhunter had been trying to fill.

Atari

Crawford’s first Atari programs were simulations. Energy Czar (1980) made the player the President’s energy czar, setting taxes, rationing and price controls, and removed them from office if a public opinion poll fell below 30 per cent. Scram (1981) was a nuclear power station written in Atari BASIC for a 16K machine, with animated cooling loops, pumps and valves the player worked with the joystick. In its game mode, earthquakes damaged components and the player had to deduce which part had failed from the temperatures, then send one of a limited number of work crews to repair it.

He also explained the Atari 400 and 800 to other programmers. Atari’s Software Development Support Group wrote De Re Atari (1982), the guide to the machines’ graphics and sound hardware, and Crawford wrote its first six sections: the system overview, ANTIC and the display list, colour registers and character sets, player-missile graphics, display list interrupts and scrolling. The hardware scrolling entry shows how his scrolling chapter used Eastern Front as its example.

Eastern Front (1941)

Eastern Front (1941) was written on his own time. He worked on it “from January of 1981 to August of 1981”, on nights and weekends, with his own equipment and an Atari Assembler/Editor cartridge, about 800 hours in all. The game put Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on a map of about ten screens that scrolled smoothly under the joystick, and the seasons changed on it: ANALOG Computing’s reviewer described rivers freezing “early in the far north and later in the south” and the ground turning muddy, then white. Orders were given with the joystick, with no typed commands. The Atari Program Exchange sold it for $29.95, and ANALOG gave it 9.3 out of 10: “No program is perfect, but this one is about as close as you can get.” Atari later reissued it.

Crawford was not modest about it at the time. “I daresay that it is the best wargame currently available,” he wrote in the first issue of Computer Gaming World, “(Please indulge me my vanity, but I really think it’s true.)” In 1986 he said it had sold 60,000 copies and earned him about $80,000 in royalties, “$100 per hour. That’s obscene”. He put the success down to the state of the market: Eastern Front was “the first game out there that did all sorts of neat things with display list interrupts, and scrolling, and it was the first accessible wargame.” What he was proudest of was that it “showed that people will respond to an intelligent game”.

The games research group

In 1982 Alan Kay hired Crawford to form a games research group within Atari’s new corporate research division. “I decided that my new goal was to pursue computer games as an art form,” Crawford said. His next game, Excalibur (1983), an Arthurian strategy game begun “just as Pac-Man mania was peaking”, was a team project, which went against his own advice about lone designers. He called it “an immensely ambitious design” that “did not succeed anywhere near as well as I had hoped”.

The book came out of the same years. The Art of Computer Game Design (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984) opened with its thesis: “computer games constitute a new and poorly developed art form that holds great promise for both designers and players”. It offered a taxonomy of games, a design sequence, and a chapter on the development of Excalibur. The Rocky’s Boots and real-time strategy entries quote from it. Its author note says Crawford “now leads the Games Research Group at Atari”. He was laid off when Atari collapsed in 1984.

Balance of Power

As a freelancer, Crawford chose the Apple Macintosh. He told INFO that the Amiga “was clearly the superior machine, but the Macintosh had the stronger marketing push”. He also wanted the 68000’s speed and a user interface he did not have to invent from scratch: “With the Atari, I had to invent a completely new language every time I did a game.”

The result was Balance of Power, published by Mindscape in 1985. The player led the United States or the Soviet Union for eight years, across 62 nations, trying to gain prestige through aid, arms, treaties and pressure without starting a war. There was no combat to play. If a crisis escalated too far, the game ended with a message that became notorious: “You have ignited an accidental nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air… We do not reward failure.” In January 1987 Family Computing named it game of the year. Not everyone liked being lectured: the novelist Orson Scott Card, writing in COMPUTE!, called that ending “an insulting message”, while still finding the game “deep and powerful”.

By Crawford’s account the game had been turned down across the industry, and he nearly lost his house when Random House demanded back a $10,000 advance. It sold slowly on the Mac, then reached the IBM PC in 1986 and the Amiga and other machines after that. Microsoft Press published his book about it, Balance of Power, in 1986; Computer Gaming World believed it was the first book about a single computer game that was not a strategy guide. He was proudest of it, he said, because “it has made a small number of people much more realistic in their appraisal of world affairs”. A 1990 edition added a multipolar level, in which smaller countries pursued their own foreign policies, and raised the count to 80 countries.

Characters instead of tanks

His next games pulled in two directions. Patton vs. Rommel (Electronic Arts, 1987) was a wargame, and he was frank about it before it came out: “It is not a great game. It is a good game, it is fun, but I don’t feel it has greatness in its bowels.”

Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot, which Mindscape scheduled for late 1987, was the opposite. The player competed with six alien acolytes, each with its own personality, for leadership of their world, trading information, forming alliances and betraying them. The characters spoke to the player through Eeyal, an invented icon language of about 80 words. Crawford’s model of “artificial personality” gave each character seven fixed traits, three feelings about each other character (love, trust and fear) and short-term moods. Mindscape’s president, Roger Buoy, called it “a publishing gamble”. It did not sell, but in 1989 Crawford still counted it as his proudest failure: “Most games don’t have real people in them. The characters are objects; like tanks with charisma.”

His later games stayed with serious subjects: The Global Dilemma: Guns & Butter (1990), Balance of the Planet (1990), an environmental simulation of 150 linked screens covering 40 years, and Patton Strikes Back (Brøderbund, 1991).

A journal and a conference

In 1987 Crawford started The Journal of Computer Game Design, published six times a year for $30 from his home in San Jose. Computer Gaming World printed regular abstracts of it. “Professionals need to share their thoughts and ideas,” he told INFO, and designers “were functioning as individuals with no way to be in touch and no real community”. It was later retitled Interactive Entertainment Design.

In April 1988 he invited designers to his house in the hills above San Jose for a meeting, which later accounts put at about 27 people. A second Computer Game Developers’ Conference followed that September at the Holiday Inn in Milpitas. Computer Gaming World counted more than 150 designers, developers and producers there, and watched Crawford lecture on creativity “wielding a bullwhip”. By late 1989, he said, the conference had had over 300 people: “I initiated the conference, but the group has taken off with the idea.” It grew into today’s Game Developers Conference. Crawford later wrote that the conference’s board eventually voted him out.

The Dragon Speech

At the 1992 conference Crawford gave the speech he is best remembered for. He described his pursuit of games as art as a quest against a dragon, and ended it with a battle cry, “For truth! For beauty! For art! Charge!”, before running out of the room. The speech was recorded, and the video is now on the Game Developers Conference’s own channel. With it, Crawford effectively left commercial game design.

He stayed a public voice. In 1996 Edge introduced him as the founder of the conference and editor of Interactive Entertainment Design, and Crawford described his own role in the industry as that of a “Prophet in the desert”. He argued that CD-ROM was a data technology when games needed processing, and that the industry sold “nerd games” to a narrow audience.

Interactive storytelling

For the next three decades Crawford worked on software for interactive storytelling: the Erasmatron in the 1990s and then Storytron, whose authoring system reached a public beta in 2008. He stopped work on Storytron around 2018, concluding, in his words, that it “was just too complicated for the audience”. His Arthurian work Le Morte D’Arthur, which he considered his one real success in the form, followed on his website. In June 2025 he announced that he was retiring from interactive storytelling: “It’s time to throw in the towel and leave interactive storytelling to others.”

He also wrote on: Chris Crawford on Game Design (New Riders, 2003) and Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling followed the 1984 book.

Released source code

The Atari Program Exchange sold the assembly-language source code of Eastern Front (1941) as a separate product with its own documentation. In 1982 a Computer Gaming World writer used it to build new scenarios, and advised readers to “get a copy of the source code” from APX; ANALOG Computing in 1983 held up the package as the model for documenting a program’s inner workings. Crawford himself told ANTIC that anyone who had read it “can testify to its clumsiness”. A scan of the manual, Source Code for Eastern Front 1941, Rev. 2, is available from the Internet Archive.

Sources

Chris Crawford, “So You Want to Write a Computer Game”, Computer Gaming World issue 3, March 1982, p. 10.
Chris Crawford, article on computer wargames, Computer Gaming World issue 1, November 1981, p. 6 (“the best wargame currently available”).
Frank Boosman, “Designer Profile: Chris Crawford”, Computer Gaming World issue 33, December 1986, pp. 46–49 (the Missouri computer centre, the IBM 1130, the KIM-1 and PET, Tanktics and Legionnaire sales and prices, teaching, the Atari games, Alan Kay and the games research group, Excalibur as a team project, the Macintosh), and part 2, issue 34, January 1987, pp. 56–59 (Eastern Front’s development, sales and royalties, Excalibur, Balance of Power, the Random House advance, the Microsoft Press book, Patton vs. Rommel).
Mindy Skelton, “An Interview with Chris Crawford”, INFO issue 29, November/December 1989, pp. 40–42 (his physics degree and teaching, joining Atari, the Macintosh and Amiga, Trust & Betrayal, the Journal and the conference).
Atari Software Development Support Group, De Re Atari (Atari Program Exchange, 1982), preface.
Chris Crawford, The Art of Computer Game Design (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984): about the author (including the 1981 and 1983 editions of Eastern Front), contents and preface.
ANALOG Computing issue 1, January 1981, p. 5: Scram announced. ANALOG Computing issue 2, March/April 1981, p. 33: review of Energy Czar. The Book of Atari Software 1983, p. 147: Scram reviewed (Atari BASIC, 16K, the earthquakes and work crews).
Jerry White, review of Eastern Front, ANALOG Computing issue 5, January 1982, p. 22.
ANTIC vol. 1 no. 5, December 1982, p. 14: Crawford on programming Legionnaire and Eastern Front.
Computer Gaming World issue 7, November 1982, p. 24 (new scenarios using the Eastern Front source code); ANALOG Computing issue 12, July 1983, p. 113 (APX’s source code package).
COMPUTE! issue 72, May 1986, p. 128: Balance of Power for the IBM PC (62 nations, eight years).
Family Computing, January 1987, p. 26: game of the year.
Rawson L. Stovall, “Don’t Touch that Button”, Computer Play, February 1989, p. 21: the nuclear war message, the 1985 release, the 1990 edition.
Orson Scott Card, COMPUTE! issue 109, June 1989, p. 36.
COMPUTE! issue 90, November 1987, pp. 17–18: Mindscape’s Roger Buoy on Balance of Power and Trust & Betrayal.
Regan Carey, review of Trust & Betrayal, Computer Gaming World issue 47, May 1988, pp. 18–19; abstracts from The Journal of Computer Game Design in the same issue, p. 26 (Eeyal, the personality model, the Journal’s price and address).
Computer Game Forum issue 1, 1987, p. 24: abstracts from The Journal of Computer Game Design.
“Notes on the Conference on Computer Game Design”, Computer Gaming World issue 56, February 1989, pp. 16–17.
Chris Lombardi, review of Balance of the Planet, Computer Gaming World issue 72, June 1990, p. 19. Alan Emrich, review of Patton Strikes Back, Computer Gaming World issue 90, January 1992, p. 106.
“An audience with Chris Crawford”, Edge issue 29, February 1996, pp. 104–106.
Chris Crawford, “The Computer Game Developers’ Conference”, erasmatazz.com (web, secondary): the first meeting in April 1988, the Milpitas conference, his removal from the board. https://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/experiences/the-computer-game-developer.html
“Video: Veteran game dev Chris Crawford’s famous ‘Dragon Speech’”, Game Developer, 15 June 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/video-veteran-game-dev-chris-crawford-s-famous-dragon-speech-
“The Dragon Speech”, transcript published with Crawford’s permission, dbohdan.com (web, secondary). https://dbohdan.com/dragon-speech
Chris Crawford, “End of An Era”, erasmatazz.com, 29 June 2025 (web, secondary): Storytron, Le Morte D’Arthur, his retirement from interactive storytelling. https://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/self/end-of-an-era.html
Wikipedia, “Chris Crawford (game designer)” (web, secondary): his birth date, the number at the first conference, the Storytron beta in 2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)
Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology, further reading: Chris Crawford on Game Design (New Riders, 2003) and Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling.
APX Source Code for Eastern Front 1941, Rev. 2, manual scan, Internet Archive (web). https://archive.org/details/APXSourceCodeForEasternFront1941Rev2