Chris Crawford (game designer)

Chris Crawford
Crawford at Cologne Game Lab (2011)
Born	(1950-06-01) June 1, 1950 (age 74) Houston, Texas, US
Occupation(s)	Video game designer Video game programmer
Years active	1976–present
Known for	Game Developers Conference
Notable work	Eastern Front (1941) Balance of Power
Website	erasmatazz.com

Christopher Crawford (born June 1, 1950) is an American video game designer and writer. Hired by Alan Kay to work at Atari, Inc., he wrote the computer wargame Eastern Front (1941) for Atari 8-bit computers which was sold through the Atari Program Exchange and later Atari's official product line. After leaving Atari, he wrote a string of games beginning with Balance of Power for Macintosh. Writing about the process of developing games, he became known among other creators in the nascent home computer game industry for his passionate advocacy of game design as an art form. He self-published The Journal of Computer Game Design and founded the Computer Game Developers Conference (later renamed to the Game Developers Conference).

In 1992 Crawford withdrew from commercial game development and began experimenting with ideas for a next generation interactive storytelling system. In 2018, Crawford announced that he had halted his work on interactive storytelling, concluding that it will take centuries for civilization to embrace the required concepts.^[1]