French – English
The MO5.COM association has the great pleasure of announcing that David Crane, creator of Pitfall! , has just joined the association as an honorary member.
He considers our initiative necessary and welcome, and offers us his support by agreeing to become an honorary member of the association. There is no doubt that the support of such a personality from the world of video games will help us to make ourselves known and develop.
Born on December 30, 1953 in Nappanee, Indiana, David Crane developed a passion for games and electronics at a very young age, and received an artistic education from his mother. As a teenager, he created a machine to play tic-tac-toe and then a similar computer while he was in college at the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona. He earned a degree in electrical engineering sciences in 1975. He began working at National Semiconductor but was already interested in video games since he attended the very first industry trade show, Gametronics '76, at his own expense. Then, his tennis partner Alan Miller recruited him in 1977 to the programming division of Atari, where he adapted arcade games like Outlaw (1976) on the Atari 2600 and worked on the operating system of the Atari 800 microcomputer. But Crane left Atari in 1979 to co-found Activision with Miller, Jim Levy, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan, in order to be better credited as game designers. At Activision, he designed several award-winning titles, the best known of which was Pitfall! (1982), the second best-selling game of 2,600 after Pac-Man. He also co-created the innovative Little Computer People (1985) on microphones which would influence The Sims fifteen years later. In 1987, David Crane left Activision to join Absolute Entertainment with Garry Kitchen. Although the new company was based in New Jersey, Crane programmed from his home in California, where he designed games like A Boy and His Blob (1989) and David Crane's Amazing Tennis (1992). Having himself researched this technology, Crane also joined the NEMO project team around 1987 in order to create a console based on full motion video on behalf of Hasbro. The machine will never be commercialized but having participated in the project, Crane notably worked on what would become Night Trap (1992). In 1995, he founded a new company with Garry Kitchen called Skyworks Technologies, a pioneer in advergaming. In 1997, she created Candystand.com, one of the first large-scale online platforms for licensed video games. At the end of 2008, Skyworks launched into the iPhone market and in the space of two years, it had five apps that were No. 1 on the App Store, and twenty-one ranked in the top 100.
Pitfall! (Atari 2600, 1982)
Little Computer People (microcomputers, 1985)
A Boy and His Blob (NES, 1990)
Night Trap (Mega-CD/3DO, 1992)
And you, why not become a member of MO5.COM too?