David Crane (programmer)

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David Crane (born in Nappanee, Indiana) is a video game designer and programmer.

Crane started his programming career at Atari, making games for the Atari 2600. After meeting up with co-worker Alan Miller in a tennis game, Miller discussed with him a plan he had to leave and found a company that would give game designers more recognition. From this meeting, he left Atari in 1979 and co-founded Activision, along with Miller, Jim Levy, Bob Whitehead and Larry Kaplan. His games have won many awards while he was at Activision. At Activision, he is best known as the designer of Pitfall!, a game that stayed at the top of the charts for 64 weeks. He used to have a personalized license plate that had Pitfall as the letters on it.

In 1986, he left Activision to co-found Absolute Entertainment with Garry Kitchen. They left mostly because of Jim Levy's departure, and the way the newly appointed CEO of Activision, Bruce Davis, treated video games more like commodities and not as creative products. Although he worked for Absolute, he did all of his programming at his home in California. For Absolute Entertainment, he was known for A Boy and His Blob, and Amazing Tennis. In 1995, Absolute Entertainment was dissolved, and became a defunct company.

In 1995, he co-founded Skyworks Technologies and currently is that organization's Chief Technical Officer.

[edit] Selected titles

Year	Title	Company
1978	Outlaw	Atari
1979	Canyon Bomber	Atari
1981	Freeway	Activision
1982	Pitfall!	Activision
1984	Pitfall II: Lost Caverns	Activision
1984	Ghostbusters	Activision
1985	Little Computer People	Activision
1989	A Boy and His Blob	Absolute Entertainment
1990	The Rescue of Princess Blobette	Absolute Entertainment
1994	Night Trap	Digital Pictures