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MO5.COM is pleased to announce that creator of Pitfall!, David Crane recently joined the association as Honorary Member.
He regards the work of our association as highly welcome and necessary, and he therefore decided to support us and become Honorary Member. Such an important figure of the video game industry will undoubtedly help us grow and gain further popularity.
Born on December 30th, 1953 in Nappanee, Indiana, United States, David Crane was into games and electronics from a very early age, and also got artistic training from his mother, an artist. He went on to build a Tic-Tac-Toe playing machine while in his teens, then a similar computer while in college at DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology degree in 1975. He started to work for National Semiconductor, but was already interested in video games since he attended the industry’s first ever trade show, Gametronics ’76, at his own cost. Fellow tennis player Alan Miller then recruited him in 1977 to the programming department at Atari, where he ported arcade games like Outlaw (1976) for the Atari 2600, and worked on the operating system for the Atari 800 computer. Crane then left Atari in 1979 and co-founded Activision, along with Miller, Jim Levy, Bob Whitehead, and Larry Kaplan, in order to get more recognition as game designers. At Activision, he created several award-winning games but is best known for designing Pitfall! (1982), the second best-selling game for the Atari 2600 after Pac-Man. He also co-created the innovative Little Computer People (1985) for microcomputers, that influenced 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 did all of his programming at his home in California, where he designed games like A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia (1989) and David Crane’s Amazing Tennis (1992). Having been researching the full motion video technology, Crane also joined the NEMO team around 1987, to design an FMV-based game system for Hasbro. The system was not released, but as part of the project Crane worked on the game that became Night Trap (1992). In 1995, Crane formed a new company with Garry Kitchen called Skyworks Technologies, that pioneered advergaming. In 1997, it created Candystand.com, one of the first, large scale branded gaming sites online. In late 2008, Skyworks entered the iPhone business and by the end of 2010, it had had five #1 game apps and 21 top 100 apps in the Apple App Store.