Early life
David Crane was born in Nappanee, Indiana in 1954. When he was young, Crane was fascinated by technology and engineering. He dismantled a black and white television to create a channel tuner near his bedside and make a TV in a cabinet on his wall and create a laser that could ignite a match at the end of a workbench. He intended to work on making gadgets that would help people in their lives but, in 2010, he reflected that "...video game design was even a better fit for that combination of skills. But as I was growing up there was no such thing as a videogame, so how could I know?" Crane's first encounter with a video game was with the Magnavox Odyssey that his parents bought him. He later admitted he was "bored by the rudimentary games" but was fascinated by the technology's potential.
Crane first encountered a computer through a Boy Scout master who worked in data processing and began learning Hollerith code for punched cards. He attended a computer programming extension campus. Once Crane graduated in 1972, he could code in three different programming languages. Crane went to the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona. He completed the four-year course in 33 months and received his degree in electrical engineering.
National Semiconductor and Atari
Following college, he moved to Silicon Valley and got his first job at National Semiconductor in 1975. At the company, he worked on linear integrated circuits in order to become proficient in electronic design.
While playing tennis with Alan Miller, he was told by his friend that Atari was looking for game programmers. After proofreading a newspaper ad his friend had made for the position, Crane wrote a resume, was interviewed the next day at 10 am and had the job by 2 pm. Crane joined Atari in the third quarter of 1977 and first began producing Arcade-inspired titles such as Outlaw and Canyon Bomber for the Atari VCS (later known as the Atari 2600). Crane was initially unsure about programming games, but found he enjoyed microprocessor programming and game design. Atari began their new line of computers with the Atari 800 and required help with software development. This led to Atari having all of its game designers, including Crane, step in to work on the machine's operating system.
In 1979, Crane and other game developers at Atari, including Miller, Larry Kaplan, and Bob Whitehead received a memo indicating that their games were the most financially successful for Atari, making up $60 million of Atari's $100 million game cartridge sales in 1978. As they were making a salary of $30,000, they asked for a raise and, according to Crane, were told by Ray Kassar that Crane was "no more important to the success of those products than the person on the assembly line who puts them together."
Activision
Crane and Miller left Atari in August 1979. They had a plan to create an independent development and publishing company to produce games for Atari's VCS console, which had not been attempted previously. Crane was suggested by a lawyer to Jim Levy in 1979. Levy had been working for GRT Records and was raising money to go into business making cassette tape software and believed abilities in marketing and the business skills to help create their new company Activision.
Initially working out of Crane's apartment, Miller and Crane began programming a development system for Activision. Whitehead and Kaplan joined shortly after. Activision had a five-year business plan, to initially make video games during the slow growth of the home computer and switch over to computers in the future. Activision's first games came out in 1980, including Crane's Dragster and Fishing Derby. The following year saw the release of Crane's Freeway while Crane also contributed to other developers' games, such as the graphics code in Kaplan's Kaboom!. In 1982, Activision released Crane's game Pitfall! which was one of the company's biggest sellers.
Activision went public in 1983. Crane spoke positively about working at the company in the early 1980s, saying that due to their rapid success "everyone wanted to work [at Activision]. [...] When Activision reached sales of $60 million, we had 60 employees. People have to work pretty hard for a company to have revenues of $1 million per employee." Crane followed Pitfall! with two games:
Absolute Entertainment
Following Activision, Crane worked independently, including finishing research work on a video game system for Hasbro. By January 1989, Crane became the Senior Designer at the publishing company Absolute Entertainment, a company formed by former Activision staff member Garry Kitchen. Kitchen contacted the Japanese company Nintendo for the rights to develop games for their Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console, which led to him being continuously rejected by the company. This led to Crane creating a development system for the NES, making them be the first company in North America to be licensed to program games for the NES.
At Absolute, Crane worked on titles for the Atari 2600, the NES, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Among these games at were Super Skateboardin', several games based on The Simpsons license, and two of his own creations: A Boy and his Blob (1989) and David Crane's Amazing Tennis (1992).
Crane recalled in a 2005 interview with Frank Cifaldi that the team "had a lot of fun on the development side, but under the rule of Nintendo, the publishing side of the game business was really tough." Crane said that to make any profit, the publisher had to predict how many games would sell in the market, saying that "If their estimate was off by 10% either way they were likely to lose money on the game." Absolute closed in 1995. Crane recalled that "It was painful to close down Absolute, but the same was happening to small publishers all around the world."
Skyworks Technologies
Following the demise of Absolute, Kitchen and Crane went into business making games that did not require inventory and began developing games for web browsers. Believing that audiences would be too afraid to give out information such as credit cards online, they developed a business model that later became known as advergaming which involved allowing their games to be played for free but licensing them to other companies' websites.
Among the games they developed built and launched Candystand for The Lifesavers Company. Crane and Skyworks took a percentage of their promotions budget and built a place to play games.[1] Crane and company also developed a site similar to Candystand for ESPN. Crane called this "moderately successful arrangement, only limited by the learning curve of their salespeople who could never quite understand the difference between sponsorship and advertising." While at Skyworks, Crane designed two of the company's biggest App store sellers with Arcade Bowling and Arcade Hoops Basketball.
2010s and Audacity Games
In 2010, Crane and Kitchen began work at AppStar. Kitchen served as president and CEO while Crane was the company's chief technical officer. They published their first game, Iron Horse in 2010. Crane began reflecting on his career in 2010 and started writing and gathering material about working on Atari 2600 games. He considered publishing them to magazines or as a book, but opted to release them through AppStar Games on the iPhone, initially writing a work on Dragster but starting with a 2600 primer titled 2600 Magic as an app. Crane later created a crowdfunding campaign Kickstarter in 2012 to fund a spiritual successor to Pitfall!, which fell far short of his funding goal.
In the late 2010s, Crane and Kitchen created a company focused on hardware technology that made cartridges and ROM boards for development of Atari 2600 games. Early in 2021, Crane, Garry Kitchen and his brother Dan Kitchen launched Audacity Games, a company dedicated to making new games for old consoles. Their first title, Circus Convoy, was released in 2021 for the Atari 2600. Crane's next Atari 2600 game for Audacity Games was Escape From Poseidon's Gate which released on October 22, 2025.
