Crawford was born in 1950 in
Houston,
Texas. After receiving a Bachelor's in physics from
UC Davis in 1972 and a Master's in physics from the
University of Missouri in 1975, Crawford taught at a
community college and the
University of California. Crawford first encountered computer games in Missouri, when he met someone attempting to computerize
Avalon Hill's
Blitzkrieg. While teaching, he wrote an early version of
Tanktics in
Fortran for the
IBM 1130 in 1976 as a hobby, then wrote
Tanktics and an early version of
Legionnaire for
personal computers such as the
KIM-1 and
Commodore PET. In 1978, Crawford began selling the games and by 1979 "made the startling discovery," he later said, "that it is far more lucrative and enjoyable to teach for fun and program for money." He joined
Atari that year, founding the Games Research Group under
Alan Kay in 1982.
1980s At Atari, Crawford started game work with
Wizard for the
Atari VCS, but Atari Marketing decided not to publish this work. He then turned his attention to the new
Atari Home Computer System. His first releases on this platform were
Energy Czar and
Scram, both of which were written in
Atari BASIC and published by Atari. He experimented with Atari 8-bit's hardware-assisted smooth scrolling and used it to produce a scrolling map display. This work led to
Eastern Front (1941), which is widely considered one of the first
wargames on a microcomputer to compete with traditional paper-n-pencil games in terms of depth.
Eastern Front was initially published through the
Atari Program Exchange, which was intended for user-written software. It was later moved to Atari's official product line. He followed this with
Legionnaire, based on the same display engine but adding real-time instead of turn-based game play. Using the knowledge gathered while writing these games, he helped produce technical documentation covering the custom hardware of the Atari 8-bit computers, from the hardware-assisted smooth scrolling to digitized sounds, with the information presented in a friendly format for a wide audience. This included videos distributed by ACE (Atari Computer Enthusiast) Support to user groups, and a series of articles published in
BYTE magazine containing most of the content of the book,
De Re Atari that would be published later by the Atari Program Exchange. By 1983,
BYTE called Crawford "easily the most innovative and talented person working on the Atari 400/800 computer today", and his name was well enough known that Avalon Hill's advertising for a revised version of
Legionnaire mentioned Crawford as author. Laid off in 1984, in the collapse of Atari during the
video game crash of 1983, Crawford went freelance and produced
Balance of Power for the
Macintosh in 1985, which was a best-seller, reaching 250,000 units sold. Crawford wrote a non-fiction book published by McGraw Hill in 1984:
The Art of Computer Game Design Game Developers Conference The
Game Developers Conference, which in 2013 drew over 23,000 attendees, was conceived of in 1987. The first gathering was held in 1988 as
salon in Crawford's living room with roughly 27 game design friends and associates. The gathering's original name, the Computer Game Developers Conference, would remain into the 1990s until the word
Computer was dropped. While the GDC has become a prominent event in the gaming industry, Crawford was eventually ousted from the GDC board, and made his final official appearance at the gathering in 1994. He eventually returned to the conference, giving lectures in both 2001 and 2006.
Withdrawal from game industry Crawford acknowledged that his views on computer game design were unusual and controversial. In a 1986 interview with
Computer Gaming World he stated that he began writing software as a hobby that became a job with the goal of writing the best possible game. Crawford said that by 1982, his goal was to pursue computer games as an art form. While denouncing
hack and slash games ("just straight run, kill or be killed"),
text adventures ("about as interesting as a refrigerator light"), and the
Commodore 64 and
Apple II ("so gutless. I don't feel I can do an interesting game on them"), he stated that
Danielle Bunten Berry,
Jon Freeman and
Anne Westfall, and himself were the only designers who had proven that they could develop more than one great game. Crawford admitted that some critics called his games inaccessible: At the 1992
CGDC, Chris Crawford gave "The Dragon Speech", which he considers "the finest speech of [his] life". Throughout the speech, he used a dragon as a metaphor for video games as a medium of artistic expression. He declared that he and the video game industry were working "at cross purposes", with the industry focusing heavily on "depth", when Crawford wanted more "breadth": to explore new horizons rather than merely furthering what has already been explored. He arrived at the conclusion that he must leave the gaming industry in order to pursue this dream. He declared that he knew that this idea was insane, but he compared this "insanity" to that of
Don Quixote: At the end of the speech, Crawford confronts the dragon: Crawford then charged down the lecture hall and out the door.
Storyworlds After his "Dragon" speech, at
GDC 1993, and his apparent exit from the gaming industry, Crawford did appear at GDC the following year but had not abandoned his unconventional views on game design.
Computer Gaming World wrote after the 1993 conference that Crawford "has opted to focus upon a narrow niche of interactive art lovers rather than continuing to reach as many gamers as possible". He served as editor of
Interactive Entertainment Design, a monthly collection of essays written for game designers. Since then, Crawford has been working on
Storytron (originally known as
Erasmatron), an
engine for running
interactive electronic storyworlds. , a beta version of the Storytronics
authoring tool, Swat, has been released. The system was officially launched March 23, 2009, with Crawford's storyworld sequel to
Balance of Power. As of December 1, 2012, the project has been in a "medically induced coma." In August 2013 Crawford released
source code of several of his games from his career to the public, fulfilling a 2011 given promise, among them
Eastern Front (1941) and
Balance of Power. ==People games==