In the days when games were created by just one man, David Crane was a superstar.
The market for home videogame machines was just beginning to flourish in the late ’70s, when Crane was singlehandedly cranking out groundbreaking games for the Atari 2600 console, which was practically the only game in town.
“Unlike today, games for the Atari game system were developed by a single person,” said Crane in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Each of us did all of the design, graphics, music, sound effects and even the play-testing for our own games.”
Kids across the nation waited patiently for new game cartridges to show up in stores. All the games came directly from Atari, as the idea of independent gamemakers hadn’t yet crossed anyone’s mind. Crane, who created games like Pitfall! and Freeway, was the wunderkind of the Atari era, pulling off amazing technical tricks on primitive hardware and creating some of the period’s best-selling and most influential titles.
Perhaps equally important, Crane (pictured, in the Atari era and now) was an entrepreneur. He helped change the face of the videogame business forever when he split from Atari to co-found Activision, the first third-party game publisher.
It’s fitting, then, that the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, the industry group which puts on the prestigious DICE Summit each year, would choose Crane as the recipient of its first Pioneer Award, which recognizes videogaming visionaries who took the first steps in the early days of the industry. The academy will present Crane with the award at its 13th annual Interactive Achievement Awards ceremony Feb. 18 in Las Vegas, the academy revealed exclusively to Wired.com.
“Being involved with the first platformer and the first third-party developer isn’t something many people can put on their resumes,” said WayForward Technologies’ Sean Velasco in an e-mail interview with Wired.com. “Before they became a huge juggernaut, Activision fought for developers’ rights and recognition.”
Crane cut his teeth in the industry at a time when videogame creation was much more of a solo act. Atari’s designers were given a computer terminal and a rudimentary manual, then asked to produce a game – any game. To be successful, they had to be an artist, designer and programmer all in one. And Crane didn’t think his bosses at Atari appreciated that.