Game Design

(Elliott) #1

on the Commodore Pet for fifteen bucks. And then I did another game calledLegion-
naire, also on the Commodore Pet. And based on that I got a job at Atari, doing game
design there. Actually, I was one of the few job candidates they had ever had who had
any experience designing computer games. It’s hard to appreciate just how tiny every-
thing was. The very notion of a computer game was, itself, very esoteric.


What was the atmosphere like at Atari then?


It was heady. Again, it’s very difficult for people nowadays to appreciate how different
things were just twenty years ago. I remember a conversation with Dennis Koble. We
met one morning in the parking lot as we were coming into work, and we were chatting
on the way in. And I remember saying, “You know, some day game design will be a
developed profession.” And he said, “Yeah, maybe someday we’ll be like rock stars!”
And we both laughed at how absurd that thought was. There were, in the world, a cou-
ple dozen game designers, most of them at Atari. And everybody knew each other, at
least everyone at Atari, and it was all very cozy. And many of them did not consider
themselves to be game designers.
For example, I remember a meeting where the department manager said, “All right
everybody, we need to print up new business cards for everybody, and we need to select
what kind of title you want.” And there was something of a debate among the staff
whether they wanted to be listed as “Game Designer” or “Programmer.” I remember
people saying, “Gee, you know, if we put our titles down as Game Designer, we may not
be able to get another job.” And I think we ended up going with “Game Programmer.”
But game design was nowhere near the thing it is today, it was just a very obscure thing.
I remember telling people when they’d ask me, “What do you do?” And I’d say, “I
design games for Atari.” And they’d say, “Wow. That’s really strange. How do you do
that?” It was a very exotic answer back then.


Were you able to do whatever you wanted in terms of game design?


It depended on what you were doing. If you were doing a VCS [Atari 2600] game, then
you talked your games over with your supervisor, but there was considerable freedom.
The feeling was, “We need plenty of games anyway, and we really need the creativity
here, so just follow your nose, see what works, see if you can come up with anything
interesting.” And in general the supervisor gave you a lot of latitude, unless you were
doing a straight rip-off of somebody else’s design. So in that area we had lots of freedom.
But once you got your design complete, there would be a design review where all of the
other designers would look it over and make their comments. This wasn’t a marketing
thing, it was a design level review.
Everybody wanted to program the computer [the Atari 800] because it was so
much more powerful than the VCS. So at the time I started, in 1979, the policy was that
you had to prove yourself by doing a game on the VCS first. And only then could you go
to the computer. Well, I mumbled and grumbled; I didn’t like that idea at all. But I
learned the VCS, and I did a game on it. However, another policy they had was that all
games had to be done in 2K of ROM. They were just coming out with the 4K ROMs, but
at the time those were rather expensive. And so the feeling was, “You can’t do a 4K
ROM. You’ve got to prove yourself, prove that you’re a worthy designer if we’re going


Chapter 14: Interview: Chris Crawford 259

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