In 1982 David Crane drew a stick figure in the middle of a sheet of paper, added a path, some trees and some treasure, and had the idea for Pitfall!. He had been carrying that running man around for three years, looking for a game to put him in. The result, a jungle of 255 screens squeezed into a 4K Atari cartridge, was by Activision’s account the best-selling video game of 1982. Crane was one of the five founders of Activision, and his games, from a chicken crossing a freeway to a little man living inside a Commodore 64, rarely looked like anyone else’s.
Fast facts
- Born: 1954 (from his age as given in 1984), and grew up in Nappanee, Indiana.
- Education: DeVry Institute of Technology, Phoenix, Arizona, in electronic engineering.
- Before games: National Semiconductor, from 1975.
- Atari: VCS game designer from the late 1970s until 1979.
- Activision: co-founder, 1979. Games include Dragster, Fishing Derby, Freeway, Laser Blast, Grand Prix, Pitfall!, Decathlon, Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, Ghostbusters and Little Computer People.
- Later: A Boy and His Blob (1989) at Absolute Entertainment; co-founded Skyworks Technologies in 1995.
An engineer who took a game job
Crane grew up in Nappanee, Indiana, which he described to Compute!’s Gazette in 1985 as a town of about 500 people with “not very much going on”. A vocational career centre at his high school was meant to train programmers for banks; Crane and some friends “just used it to learn how to program computers in three languages and then went on to college”. At the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix he studied electronic engineering, played in national foosball tournaments and built a noughts-and-crosses machine from discrete components, “in the era before microprocessors”.
In 1975 he joined National Semiconductor, in a department making chips for non-computer electronics, and built a computer of his own to introduce the engineers to computing. “After two years at National, I felt I could do just about anything in electronics,” he said. “So what did I do? I took a job as a game designer at Atari, where I didn’t use any of my engineering skills whatsoever.” At Atari he programmed the VCS, and Electronic Games later noted that he had also been one of the early programmers of the Atari 800 computers.
Activision
In 1979 Crane was one of four Atari VCS designers who left, with Jim Levy as president, to found Activision. “There was a group of us that knew we were good, so we set out to start a company,” he said. The company’s first job, working out how the VCS behaved and building a development system without Atari’s help, was done in Crane’s spare bedroom. The founding, and the Atari lawsuit that followed, are told in Atari vs Activision.
His early Activision games came from everyday things. Freeway began when Crane and some friends left a Chicago trade show by the wrong exit and had to dodge across Lake Shore Drive at rush hour; later that day Larry Kaplan watched a man from a bus doing the same. Crane first tried a crawling human as the thing crossing the road, but, Electronic Games explained, it did not seem right to have him “squashed flat 20 times a game”, so it became a chicken. Grand Prix, he told Video Games in 1982, “began with nothing more than a pretty car”.
He was a designer who got bored quickly, and said so. “Back in the days when people were still playing space games, I had tired of space games,” he told Compute!’s Gazette. “I end up producing what people are ready for about the time they’re ready for it.”
Pitfall!
The running man came first. Crane told Edge in 2003 that he had developed a realistic running figure in 1979, before he had a game that needed one, and tried him in other ideas, including a cops-and-robbers game, without success. In 1982, between games, he sat down with a blank sheet of paper: “I said, ‘Okay, I have a little running man and let’s put him on a path.’ ‘Where is the path? Let’s put it in a jungle.’ ‘Why is he running?’” Treasures to collect and enemies to avoid followed. He told Computer & Video Games in 1984 that he had no fixed plan for it: “I just added objects off the top of my head like pits, vines, ladders leading into the pits and the odd scorpion until I ran out of memory.”
Memory was the problem. Pitfall! gives Pitfall Harry 20 minutes to find 32 treasures across 255 screens of jungle, with tunnels underneath that cross three screens for every one above. The cartridge held 4K. “There isn’t enough memory to hold both Harry’s graphic frames and the definitions for 254 screens,” Crane said in 2003 (the period guides count 255). “I solved this problem on Pitfall! by creating an algorithm that defined every screen mathematically. The actual definition of the entire world took less than 50 bytes of ROM.”
The crocodiles came from a cartoon he remembered from childhood, in which Heckle and Jeckle, two magpies, ran across alligators’ heads. At first the player had to push the joystick and press the button at exactly the same moment to jump from head to head, which “proved to be almost impossible to play”. Crane changed the code to accept a push that came just after the button: “From a programming standpoint this was a tiny change, but it changed the gameplay from nearly impossible to an easily learned skill.”
In 1984 Computer & Video Games put the work at “some 500–700 programming hours” over six or seven months; by 2003 Edge’s account had it at about 1,000 hours. Its sales are harder to pin down. In May 1983 Activision claimed a million copies each for Pitfall! and Crane’s Laser Blast, and said Pitfall! had been the best-selling game of 1982. By 1985 Commodore User reported it was “reputed to have sold more than five million copies”, and added that one American magazine had suggested Crane “had earned more money from royalties on Pitfall than Michael Jackson had currently earned for Thriller”. Crane would not be drawn: asked how rich he was, he said the job had made him “rich in experience”. Edge reported in 2003 that the game spent 64 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart. Computer & Video Games reported that Pitfall! was voted the best game of 1983 in the United States, and Video Games photographed its editor handing Crane an award for it at the start of 1984.
Crane followed it with Decathlon, which he had started before Pitfall! and shelved because the ten events would not fit in the memory then available, and Pitfall II: Lost Caverns (1984).
Ghostbusters
When Activision offered him a game of the film Ghostbusters in 1984, Crane hesitated. “To do justice to any game takes no less than 500 hours of my time, and I was getting married in six weeks,” he told Compute!’s Gazette. What changed his mind was a Commodore 64 game he had been writing for months, with a city map, a car to drive around it and a construction set to equip the car. “It was a game concept in search of a theme,” he said, and the theme had just arrived.
With a 12K head start, he had rough gameplay within a week, working in two-hour bursts in the middle of the night. He brought in the artist Hilary Mills to draw from his sketches, and Tom Shotter to convert her pictures into data the program could use. Adam Bellin looked after the program while Crane was on honeymoon. The producer Brad Prager suggested the speech, and Electronic Speech Systems of Berkeley compressed it to fit. “The final game was the result of a group of four to five people,” Crane told Commodore User.
Ghostbusters topped the charts in Britain and the United States, according to Commodore User, and was beaten only by Knight Lore for game of the year at the Computer & Video Games Golden Joystick awards in 1985. Crane was unapologetic about aiming it at players who were not chasing high scores: “I always design games for me. And since I play games a lot, I get tired of whatever’s currently popular fairly quickly and want to move on to the next thing.”
Little Computer People
Little Computer People (1985) put a small man, his dog and his house inside a Commodore 64. The idea was not Crane’s. As he told Edge in 2005, the artist and designer Rich Gold had imagined a “Pet Person” in the spirit of the Pet Rock, a fishbowl view of a life that ignored its viewer, and had paid a developer, James Wickstead Design Associates, to build it. No publisher wanted a program you could only watch. Activision’s president, Jim Levy, showed it to Crane, who saw “the beginnings of an interactive simulated life form” and took it on.
He kept the graphics, sound and music and rebuilt the rest, arguing with Gold over whether the little man should respond to his owner at all. Activision personalised every disk during manufacture so that each owner’s person had his own personality. Crane wrote a parser for typed suggestions and a letter-writing system that assembled messages from more than a hundred phrases chosen by mood. His way round the limits of the parser was to let the little man refuse: “As a compromise I gave the LCP the power to ignore you… You could never tell if he was stumped by your syntax or if he was just upset with you and willing to ignore you all day.” The project took two years when most games took four or five months, and, Crane said, “Despite the critical success, Little Computer People was not a financial success.”
Absolute Entertainment and after
Crane later left Activision. By 1989 he had joined Absolute Entertainment, a New Jersey company set up by Garry Kitchen and other game designers to make cartridges; its president described him as a recent hire. There he designed A Boy and His Blob (1989), written first for the Nintendo Entertainment System. A boy feeds jellybeans to a shape-changing blob from the planet Blobolonia, and each flavour turns the blob into a different tool: a vanilla bean makes an umbrella. The game had hundreds of screens and, Crane told The Games Machine, a “Point of View” feature that let the player peek at nearby areas without risking the boy.
In 1995 he co-founded Skyworks Technologies, which made advergames: promotional games for websites. When Edge asked him in 2003 to name his favourite game, he gave the answer he always did: “It’s the one I’m working on right now.”
Sources
- Kathy Yakal, “David Crane: The Designer Behind Ghostbusters”, Compute!‘s Gazette issue 21, March 1985, pp. 50–54: Nappanee, the career centre, DeVry, National Semiconductor, joining Atari; founding Activision; space games; Ghostbusters’ 500 hours and the car game “in search of a theme”.
- Computer & Video Games issue 28, February 1984, p. 40, interview by Clare Edgeley: his age; how Pitfall! and Decathlon were designed; 500–700 hours; the 1983 award. Same issue, “Professor Video”: 255 screens, 32 treasures, 20 minutes.
- K-Power vol. 1 no. 3, April 1984: his age.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 1, Winter 1981, p. 12: the origin of Freeway.
- Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 3, March 1985, pp. 57–60: Atari 800 programming; the making of Ghostbusters; Mills, Shotter, Bellin, Prager and Electronic Speech Systems; “I always design games for me”.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 1, August 1982, pp. 29–30: Grand Prix.
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 4, June 1982: Crane as creator of Fishing Derby, Laser Blast and Freeway. Videogaming Illustrated, August 1982: Dragster.
- Video Games vol. 2 no. 7, April 1984: photograph of the award to Crane for Pitfall!.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games vol. 1 no. 7, May 1983: Activision’s sales claims for Pitfall! and Laser Blast.
- Commodore User, April 1985, p. 8, profile of David Crane: “five million copies”; the royalties comparison; “rich in experience”; Ghostbusters’ chart success and “four to five people”.
- “The making of… Pitfall”, Edge issue 129, November 2003, pp. 114–115: the running man; the jungle; the algorithm; the crocodiles and the jump; 1,000 hours; 64 weeks on the Billboard chart; Skyworks; his favourite game.
- “The making of… Little Computer People”, Edge issue 147, March 2005: Rich Gold and Wickstead; the parser, the letters and “the power to ignore you”; two years’ work; not a financial success.
- Knight Lore’s Golden Joystick award ahead of Ghostbusters: see Knight Lore.
- Atarian vol. 1 no. 2, July 1989: interview with Garry Kitchen, Absolute Entertainment’s president, on hiring Crane.
- ANALOG Computing issue 59, April 1988: the founding of Absolute Entertainment.
- The Games Machine issue 22, September 1989, pp. 20–21, interview by Marshal M Rosenthal: A Boy and His Blob.
- The spare-bedroom development system: Larry Kaplan, interviewed in Commodore Magazine vol. 10 no. 7, July 1989; see Atari vs Activision.