Chris Crawford (game designer)

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Chris Crawford is a noted computer game designer and writer, responsible for a number of important games in the 1980s, for founding The Journal of Computer Game Design and for organizing the Computer Game Developers' Conference.

After receiving a B.S. in physics from UC Davis in 1972 and an M.S. in the same from University of Missouri - Columbia in 1975, Crawford taught at a community college and the University of California, then turned his game design hobby into a job at Atari in 1979.

He worked on a number of games at Atari, including the best-selling Eastern Front, and as manager of their Games Research Group, wrote The Art of Computer Game Design.

Laid off in the Atari collapse during the video game crash of 1983-1984, he went freelance and produced the innovative Balance of Power in 1985, which was both highly-regarded and a best-seller, reaching 250,000 units sold. Additional creative strategy games followed, often taking commercial risks in order to explore new creative ideas (such as fog of war in Patton Versus Rommel).

The Game Developers Conference, which now draws over 10,000 attendees each year, began in 1987 as a series of salons held in Crawford's living room with his game design friends and associates. While the GDC has become a prominent event in the gaming industry, Crawford was eventually ousted from the GDC board.

Since 1992, Crawford has been working on Storytron (originally known as Erasmatron), an authoring tool for interactive electronic storyworlds (see interactive storytelling). A "pre-alpha" version of the Storytronics development system, Swat, has been released, with the alpha form expected by autumn 2006.