The subterranean path dramatically changed gameplay and it worked as a shortcut. You would travel three screens underground for every one screen above ground. But the shortcuts weren’t without risk as Pitfall!’s subterranean world was littered with scorpions. Crane liked the split between the two worlds so much that he forced the player to go below ground to collect all the treasures. “It’s this kind of tweaking that raises a game from mediocrity,” he says.

Cram too much action into a 2600 game and characters start to flicker. It was often the case when an arcade game was translated for home use. For example, Pac-Man has five objects – four ghosts and one Pac-Man. The 2600 could only display two objects. Such a forced conversion to the 2600 guaranteed flicker.
   


During the early days of Activision all their games were original concepts, not home versions of arcade games. Developers were not forced into situations where they had to create a certain type of game to fit within the 2600’s fixed platform. By not forcing themselves into a corner early on, Activision games didn’t appear short of expectations (that is, no flicker). “If you design a game to work within the limitations of a severely limited machine, you’re going to make a game where people don’t realise how limited the machine is,” says Crane.
   
To create enemies, Crane played a gentle balance between what could be drawn by the machine and visually interpreted by the player. Drawing characters on a piece of paper, objects went in if they were easily recognisable and didn’t eat up too much memory. For example, Crane successfully drew a coiled snake, but wouldn’t even attempt a whirlpool. It would be far too complicated. “Each thing you see in there was the result of a lot of work to determine whether or not people could tell what it was when you put it in the game. There was a lot of trial and error.”

In 1979, Crane and some fellow programmers left Atari to create their own company, Activision. They wanted to continue designing games for the 2600, but were tired of the lack of credit Atari gave its programmers. Activision decided that its sales model for games would be like that of book sales and so they marketed both the title and the author. Each game included the name and a photo of the designer. If gamers liked a particular developer’s game they would eagerly seek out the next game he created.
   


The model proved successful. Crane became one of the first game programming superstars. Pitfall! clubs, thousands of members strong, sprung up everywhere. The game sold $50m (£31.2m) wholesale, received thousands of fan mail, and was game of the year in ’82, spending 64 weeks on the Billboard charts as the number one selling game. The game spawned a sequel and a Saturday morning animated series and in both 1983 and 1984, Crane was named Designer of the Year by the American magazines Video Game Update, Video Review and Computer Entertainer.
   
Thirty years of game programming and 60 games later, Crane still can’t stop. In 1995, Crane co-founded Skyworks Technologies, a company that creates advergames, marketing websites that use sponsored videogames to pass along an advertising message. Instead of looking to the new consoles which required 10–20 people and one or two years to develop a game, “We came to view the internet as the latest videogame system, and with limited bandwidth this new ‘game system’ is more like the systems of the past.” As chief technical officer of Skyworks, he still loves his work, and consumes himself with whatever project he has, sometimes working 18 hours in a given day. Whenever Crane is asked to pinpoint his favourite game, he always responds, “It’s the one I’m working on right now.”

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared in E129.

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