David Crane (programmer)

David Crane (programmer)

David Patrick Crane (born 1953 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 co-worker Alan Miller in a tennis game, Miller told Crane about a plan he had to leave Atari and found a company that would give game designers more recognition. From this meeting, Crane left Atari in 1979 and co-founded Activision, along with Miller, Jim Levy, Bob Whitehead, and Larry Kaplan. His games won many awards while he was at Activision. At Activision, he was best known as the designer of Pitfall!. Pitfall! was a huge hit, and maintained the top slot on the Billboard charts for 64 weeks and was named video game of the year in 1982.

Crane maintained that the Atari policy of relying on mangled adaptations of arcade games would result in a glut of cheap, unappealing games, which became one of the contributing factors to the Video Game Crash of 1983. He believed instead that tailoring new games to the strengths and weaknesses of the 2600 machine 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 Absolute was based in New Jersey, Crane did all of his programming at his home in California. With Absolute, he was known for Amazing Tennis and A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia, a successful NES title following the adventures of the protagonist and his companion, a shape-shifting blob. In 1995, Absolute Entertainment was dissolved.

In 1995, Crane co-founded Skyworks Technologies as the organization's Chief Technical Officer.

Crane is currently working as an independent Video Game Developer and Video Game Expert Witness.