David Crane (programmer), Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetDavid Crane (programmer)
American video game designer and programmer
Date of Birth: 09-Oct-1950
Place of Birth: Nappanee, Indiana, United States
Profession: engineer
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Libra 
About David Crane (programmer)
- David Patrick Crane (born 1953 in Nappanee, Indiana, United States) is a video game designer and programmer.Crane originally worked in the field of hardware design for National Semiconductor.
- He went to college at DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology degree in 1975.
- Crane started his programming career at Atari, making games for the Atari 2600.
- He also worked on the operating system for the Atari 800 computer.
- 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.
- Over four million copies of the game were sold in the 1980s.
- It was the second best-selling game for the Atari 2600 after Pac-Man.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.
- Crane said that he left because the newly appointed CEO of Activision, Bruce Davis, offered a pay cut with the promise of a vaguely worded incentive program.
- Although Absolute was based in New Jersey, Crane did all of his programming at his home in California.
- With Absolute, he was known for David Crane's 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 creature.
- In 1995, Absolute Entertainment was dissolved.In 1995, Crane co-founded Skyworks Technologies as the organization's Chief Technical Officer. In 2012, Crane launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a game called Jungle Adventure.
- The goal was not reached.
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