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People, Not Things: The Enigma Of Chris Crawford
By Steve FultonI’ve always been a fan of Chris Crawford.
To me probably one of the first “indie” developers even though he spent some time inside the corporate walls of Atari Inc. Crawford has often worked in the margins on experiences that are in a word, “different”, either in design, approach, play mechanics,or a combination of all three.I knew of Crawford in his Atari days, and his work struck me as singular, unique and fascinating. played his games in the 80s, read his various articles in magazines, and generally associated him with my good thoughts about Atari Inc. from the golden age.
In 2005, after reading his Book “On Game Design” I invited Crawford to come to my place of work and give a fascinating and thrilling seminar on game design for our development team.. After the talk, over dinner, I told him how much I loved his work, and how it had inspired me to make games, but that, as of yet, decades later, I had never made anything I was proud of. Over a plate of orange chicken, Crawford said these words to me that inspired me for the rest of my life:
“20 years is long time Steve what’s stopping you from making that game in your head”The answer was : “nothing”, and 8 months later I created the first of many games that was played 10’s of millions of times. I still point to that singular moment of inspiration, over dinner, where his simple but motivating words helped me turn my game development dreams into reality
So back in June of this year It was heartbreaking to read these words on Crawford’s longtime blog https://www.erasmatazz.com/
“ I failed. It’s time to throw in the towel and leave interactive storytelling to others. I don’t think that the world is ready.” . ”
What happened to Chris Crawford?
In 2020 Jeff and I recorded an unreleased podcast to be named “Thankful For Chris Crawford:, that was never finished. Here is how we described Chris Crawford’s affect on us as Atari fans
Steve: Hey Jeff,
Jeff: hey Steve.
Steve: Can I tell you something I’m thankful for?
Steve: What do you thankful for Steve?
Steve: I’m thankful for World Renown, Atari Game Designer, Chris Crawford.
Jeff: I’m thankful for Chris Crawford too.
Steve: I’ve a very specific reason why I’m thankful for Chris Crawford, and I have a story all about that later in this episode.
Jeff: But why are you thankful for Chris Crawford?
Steve: I’m thankful for him to use America vernacular for “Of the Atari.”
Jeff: Of ” The Atari?” “De Re Atari.”
Steve: Oh, is that what’s out of his book?
Steve: I’ll tell you that there was a time when “To Me” Chris Crawford and Atari were like one in the same time.
Steve: Yeah, you didn’t separate those two.
Jeff: Because one of the names I saw in a couple different games for “The Atari 100” was Chris Crawford.
Steve: Chris Crawford’s Eastern Front, Chris Crawford’s Excalibur, and his name showed up on the title screen in a way that hardly any other name showed up associated with Atari games.
Jeff: Yeah, when you saw that name, you knew something quality was there.
Steve: It was not going to be an arcade game.
Jeff; It was going to be a quality game.
We weren’t buying computers to play arcade games. But we bought an Atari We want to play a computer to play games that weren’t our key games. We wanted in-depth games because we played enough little twitchy stuff
I went back to look at his career and try to figure it all out.
When Chris Crawford started at Atari in 1979, he began on an Atari 2600 game.
The unreleased “Wizard” is an unremarkable maze game that was more of a tech demo than anything else. Coming off his previous, pre-Atari computer games, Tanktics and Legionnaire, Crawford found the VCS too limiting of canvas for his creative pursuits..
I interviewed Cjhriust Crawford in 2008, and this is what he had to say about programming Wizard
It was a very difficult machine to program. You had 128 bytes of RAM, and 2K of ROM space and the video display was driven by the CPU, the 6502 and so basically, most of your code consisted of the drawing code. you had exactly 76 machine cycles in which to do this..or on average about 35 assembly language commands. That’s pretty tight restrictions.
”
He was relieved when the release of the Atari 400/800 computer systems later that year game him the opportunity to flex more creative music on a much more capable canvas.
Crawford’s first few games for the Atari 800 showed the signs of an auteur, even if they were more pedestrian in concept.
“Energy Czar” a game about energy, subsidies and pollution
for The Atari 8-bit was originally designed so complicated and opaque as to make sure players read the manual (“RTFM”),
Crawford felt he was teaching the players a lesson
Until Crawford, with help from his manager Dale Yokum, came to his senses and made it easier to play.
In my interview, Crawford described his time in the Atari 8-bit group like this:“Yeah. I think I had 4 different jobs at Atari. My first job was as a Stella programmer and that lasted 3 months and I wrote one program for Stella named Wizard. After that I was transferred to the Home computer Applications group where I was programming the home computer, and that lasted about 10 months. Energy Czar and SCRAM were made during that time. “
SCRAM, also for the Atari 8-bits, is a game about running a nuclear reactor. It was pretty straightforward as game,
and the “difference” came years later in his book “On Game Design” (which I used as the source for much of this essay)
when Crawford analyzed the game with the naked observations from hindsight:
“If I had to do it all over again I would start my design process by asking myself
‘what is fun and interesting about nuclear power plants?’ and the answer of course would be ‘not much’ and I would walk away from
building such a game”
Then there is Easter Front, another 8-bit game. One of ironies.
where the joystick and scrolling map offers ease access into
a beautiful computer game about Hitler invading Russia during world war II.
Crawford described Eastern Front like this:Eastern Front was the classic example of technological opportunism. The way many games are designed nowadays…and I’m very critical of technological opportunism. I did it back then. The Atari 800 had this wonderful scrolling capability. I developed a little scrolling map thing just to show off to people this wonderful capability.
It’s a fun and engaging game, but it’s also put-on. The game is almost impossible to win. Oh it can be won mind you, but by combining an easy user interface and nice graphics to game That is so hard as to be impossible, Crawford seemed to be sending a message: the point of the Eastern Front is to not play. The game was top-seller for Atari, and cemented Crawford as an early computer game designer.
I showed it to the Atari people, the marketing people, and they said ‘oh geez, this will never sell. it’s a war game’ they said ‘you can put it in the Atari Program Exchange”. I put it there and it was a huge hit. The next year they came and said ‘why don’t you do a new version for us that we will release as an official Atari product?” So you know, they were just completely wrong.
In 2020 I sent Crawford a message on facebook about the Eastern Front and asked him if it had been designed in a somewhat subversive way to make a point For that unreleased podcast in 2020, I recited his response:
After this response, It was proven to me what I always felt in my gut. Crawford had been striving his entire career to make game that tell a story far beyond the subject matter, with context between the lines. I realize this is always in the eye of the beholder, but me, to me, he was been trying, to create “art”
After Eastern Front Chris Crawford was recruited in the Atari Research in late 1981.
He was recruited by the legendary Alan Kay, Atari Chief Scientist from 1981-1984 who led the design of the GUI interface, Dynabook,
and other foundational computer inventions while working for Xerox PARC.
Kay’s instructions were for him to “dream”
This is when Crawford’s game designs took a dramatic turn towards interesting, artistic and independent.
Armed with the thought that “computer games are about things, not people” he set out to design a game about “people, not things.”
The first result of this was “Gossip”, a game about social interactions where the “win state”
The manual describes the way to win the game:
“This game is very different from other games. You have to be very sneaky to win.
First, your goal is to make the boys like you better than any of the other
girls. You can’t blast the other girls with laser blasters or hyperwarp them to another galaxy, or even smash them with floating asteroids. You’ll just have to convince the boys that they should like you more. “
(https://www.atariarchives.org/APX/showdocs.php?cat=unknown_gos)
Unlike the successful Eastern Front, Gossip saw a very very limited release in 1983
To Crawford it was a designed exercise and never meant to be a product.
To that end, its existence in digital form is easy to validate, but the physical is elusive and hard to find.
Crawford’s last game for Atari was Excalibur, and boy was this one a doozy.
It’s an epic combination of almost every other game he created prior: war, economics, politics, and even interpersonal relations
in the guise of a grand strategy game.
The instruction manual describes the game like this:
Back in 1984, I found Excalibur to be a sweeping epic. I poured dozens of into it, trying to find its secrets. I fought battles, made policies, tapped Merlion for help, and watched the interpersonal relationships of Camelot play out around the round table. It’s still one of my top-10 Atari 8-bit games, and one of the few Atari 800 games I I ever played that truly delivered the true promise of what a computer game could be.It was probably the first game of its kind, only matched in the mid-80’s by the likes of
Seven Cities Of Gold by Dani Bunten and Sid Meier’s Pirates!
Finally, next came the game I want to talk about today: Balance Of Power.
At first for his next game, Crawford considered another War game, but then he thought better of it.A child of the 1960’s, he was no fan of actual war, and realized it was time he faced that reality.He described it as the “Un-War” game. In his early notes he described it this way:
“The game would be serious, it would be very educational, and I think it would grab a great deal of attention.
It would not be action packed, but I think that the launching of armageddon would be far more wrenching in this game than
missile command ever was. “
The game starts with a map of the world, highlighting “hot zones” in red were revolutions are taking place. Your job is to use America’s hard and soft power to win the cold war against the USSR
As soon as the title screen shows, you know you are in for something different. Something truly “Crawfordian” In an RTFM moment, similar to SCRAM, the Title screen says “People Who play This Game without Reading the manual are wasting their time”
At first the game seems easy. Just read the news to figure out who is on the side of the USSR (government or rebels) and then fund the other side. You can send indirect or direct military aid, economic aid, form treaties, etc. It’s a very compelling game. You see a colored zone, and you jump to “do something”, just like in any other games. But this is not any other game. Sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing, or to plan to do something, but wait to see what the USSR does.Many times the USSR will back down but some time they do not.If you take things too far, you could end up causing a nuclear war simply by, dor example standing your ground on a Burmese insurgency response.
When you do, the following screen is displayed.A screen that has haunted me ever since I saw it for the first time in 1988
Obviously Crawford’s tenure at Atari had changed him. He began his work there making action games on the Atari 2600Similar to Missile Command, and just 4 years later he was ready to create grand games that dealt with serious topics”But would anyone care? Since the Eastern Front, he had not made a game that resonated with the public.Balance Of Power has elements of many if Crawford’ games that came before it. You can feel the relationship tensions of Gossip brewing and Excalibur brewing below the surface as the USA and USSR battle for dominance of the mid-80’s cold war era. There “lost cause” doom of tEastern Front is there too. But at the same time it feels wholly original: like a magnum opus of sorts.
Crawford had a very difficult time getting the game publishers interested in the game , but an article in Infoworld by Scott Mace published August 27 helped move things along. , In the article Mace wrote of Crawford 1984
Soon, Mindscape picked-up the game and took a chance publishing it.
It became a sizable hit. Spending months on the Computer Entertainer top-20 list, generating $10 million in sales. It cemented Crawford as one of first true auteurs of 80s computer games.
The game was released for the Apple Macintosh first, and was also one of the first games for Microsoft Windows. The Atari ST version was released in 1987.
Like most of Crawford’s games, Balance Of Power still holds-up today. Beyond the graphics and user interface. It’s quite enjoyable to try to beat the USSR (or USA) for prestige, by making the correct choices with influence and power. It taxes the brain in a way that only the best computer game experiences of the era could muster.
Sadly, Balance Of Power was pretty much the last game Chrus Crawford that was released on an Atari platform.
Crawford was not done though, and his next really experimental game. Siboot (full title: Trust & Betrayal: The Legacy of Siboot) took all of this to another level, but sadly, it was only released on the Macintosh, and while it garnered good reviews, the quirky design that mixed A.I. with aliens, auras, and influence did not sell particularly well. In his book on game design, Crawford explained it this way:
(play siboot here:DOSBox SVN, CPU speed: 3000 cycles, Frameskip 0, Program: SIBOOT)
He then tried to return to commercial success with a series of straight-away war and strategy games, but most of them were not commercial hits.
In the mid 1990s, After starting the game developer conference, then being forced out over his controversial ideas on games, Chris Crawford left the game industry, and spent the next 35 years or so, trying to perfect the “social relationship” concepts he pioneered in Gossip. The same ones that fueled Excalibur and the underlying strategy in Balance Of Power.
His in 1993 GDC presentation named “The Dragon Speech said it all(Crawford dates the speech top 1993, but the GDC dates it as 1992)Crawford described it this way on his web site:“This is without doubt the finest lecture I have ever given. It was my way of explaining to the industry why I felt it necessary to go off in a new direction. That direction, it turned out, was interactive storytelling, and this shows how far ahead of my time I was.”.–https://www.erasmatazz.com/personal/videos/the-dragon-speech-1993.htmGDC Founder Chris Crawford’s Dragon Speech
Here is short excerpt where Crawford commits to “slay the dragon” :
“the reality in which Don Quixote lived was a sorted and ugly reality the people were scrabbling for survival. he didn’t want that,.he wanted to live in a world where there was truth and and human dignity and yes loveand try as he might he couldn’t accommodate that to the real worldother people were
able to compromise enough to reach an accommodation don quixote, for him the Gap was too great he couldn’t Bridge it and so instead of giving up on it he imposed
his reality onto the real world where other people saw a filthy country hostile he saw a castle where other people saw a flock of sheep he saw a mighty Army where other people saw a windmill he saw a dragon. yes do quixote was a crazy old fool. you know he was more honest about his dreams than most people and for that I honor him so the time has come for me to make my commitment I have committed myself I have dedicated myself to the
pursuit of the dragon “
I really can’t do this justice with a few screenshots and my own recitation. To really understand the depth an [passion of Crawford’s commitment to his dream of interactive storytelling, you need to go watch the video of his speech from GDC 1993.
After that Crawford took himself out of the game development, but people (even people like myself) did try to drag him back in, even if he didn’t want to be there. Over the years, he gained an undeserved reputation as computer game naysayer, when in reality he just wanted to follow his own heart and the “dream” of creating interactive experiences about “people, not things”
Here is Crawford from an interview I did with him on 2008:
“I have not made any effort what-so-ever to teach people about games in 15 years. single public pres…i mean the books i’ve published,I’ve published 3 books,
one was on Interactivity, which I’m very well versed to write about, another
was on Interactive Storytelling, which I’m very well verse to write about “
and the third about games, and the publisher approached me, and said ‘geez, we’d really like you to write this book’. Yeah, I make no attempt to teach about the current generation of games. All of my public presentations have been at the request of the host. I’ve never gone out and looked for any , they just call me up and they want me to talk. In a couple cases I’ve told them, ‘I haven’t done a game in 15 years’, and they say ‘well,we still want you’”
In that time he watched his ideas get watered-down into big selling yet soulless endeavors like :The Sims”, that took only the most base aspects of his concepts of “social relationships in games” and used them for the computer game equivalent of fart jokes.
He stuck to his guns, with a goal to create a set of tools that would allow storytellers to build true interactive fiction, devoid of the trappings of “computer games”, allowing for complex interactions and deep relationships.
In the early 2000s, long before the current “indie games industry” Chris Crawford envisioned a way for regular people with wild ideas to try to make games. A true democratization of game development:“They spend millions of dollars making a game and there is no easy way to build a good game that can get a fair shot in the marketplace. That means they have cut-out one of their best sources of creative input which is all the crazy people out there. the model I like to use for this is, Hollywood has it nailed down and the games industry really should learn from Hollywood here, although it night be too late. Basically there are 8 million people (surveys show) 8 million people in this country will tell pollsters ‘yes, I have an idea for a novel I want to write”. Out of those 8 million a few hundred thousand apparently, each year actually write something. Out of those few hundred thousand, I think it is something like 10,000 actually produce a manuscript that they ship to a publisher. Out of those 10,000 only a few hundred are published. Out of those few hundred, only a handful actually hit the big time. Maybe a dozen make a goodly amount of money. Out of those dozen, 1 or 2 will be cherry picked to make a movie. Think of it as a pyramid creative base is 8,000,000 ideas and at each level there is a selection that takes place that knocks out 98% of everything. It’s a sorting system that takes the very best for the full treatment.” The result was Storytron, a tool to allow writers and designers to get their visions into an interactive form:
Again, Crawford:“ There were many breakthroughs of major developments that I’ve had to make, and that is one reason why it has taken 15 years. If it was just one technology I had to build then it would have been done years ago. moreover, there is a strong synergistic relationship between these components and so I could not see them all at once. . I started work on the basic engine and it in itself was a breakthrough in how it handles drama and so-forth, and it was only one and by itself it was insufficient. I didn’t realize that it’s biggest problem was that it was very difficult to program the engine, to give the engine the data it needed to tell good stories. That was the engine I did between ’91 and about ’94 and ’95. The next big breakthrough was building the editor that allowed a user to program the engine…to develop the data set required for the engine because that’s a very complex data set and it’s hard and it took me a year to that because I had to build a scripting language and the fundamental requirement was…if I was just writing a scripting language for programmers it would have been trivial, I could have knocked it off in a few months, because everybody has done that, but my requirement was that this had to be something accessible to non-technical people.
”
By 2005 I had pretty much lost track of Chris Crawford. He still occupied space in brain, but his relative absence in the mainstream had taken its toll on my memory of him. Looking for game design books that year, I happened upon “On Game Design”, and found it an absolutely fascinating read. It was at this time that I read On Game Design, and realized Chris Crawford was still in the game in some way. I found his contact information, and was able to schedule a game design training with him.
Jeff and Talked about meeting with Chris Crawford on an unreleased podcast from 2020
Steve: So do you remember, you know, so.. We met Chris Crawford once.
Jeff: We did. Oh, we were working together at an entertainment company.
Steve: And we were working with a team that was starting to build lots of games for their brands.
Jeff: Yes. And these were flash games mostly.
Steve: And we brought him in to teach the team about game design. And it was awesome.
Jeff: It was fascinating.
Steve: It was the most fascinating, I think, eight hours I’ve ever spent sitting in a room.
To understand just how detailed and indepth yet fascinating a talk by Crawford can be, here is an excerpt from his book Understanding Interactivity, which he had just finished when he did our seminar
(from chapter 25, A History In Interactivity)
.
“It all started long ago before Doss, before television, before cavemen. ther nature was screwing around with the new kind of critter, the mammal. And the basic design looked pretty versatile.On a whim, she tried giving some of the mammals bigger brains and more intelligence.And lo and behold, it worked. Critters with bigger brains seemed to do better. But at a certain point, the brains got so big that a problem emerged. What do you put in those brains? Other nature had gotten pretty handy cooking up various systems that could detect, analyze, and respond to all manner of complicated environmental situations.Urbivore brains could combine sensory information from ears and eyes to detect approaching predators, analyze their motion, and plot the best route of escape.
Later, she concocted some snazzy of Asian algorithms that permitted prey to zig and
zig, but just the right timing to throw off closely pursuing predators.But these were all hardwired into the synapses. The critical information about how to do these things was encoded into the DNA, and the critter was born with the ability. The bigger brains she was experimenting with were capable of all sorts of snazzy calculations. But bigger brains need more data, and that’s what raised the problem. She was getting tired of hand-coding DNA with all those complicated neural algorithms. More important, she realized that she couldn’t keep going this way forever. Eventually, she’d run out of DNA for all these algorithms, and the new 256 megabyte drums were a long ways off.
She fiddle around aimlessly for a few eons, trying various combinations, none of which seemed to work. And then she stumbled on to the solution with one of the minor orders.
Probably Felix. That’s the cats. The big idea was this, don’t bother programming.
The brain with all the behavioral techniques and algorithms. Don’t bother programming the brain with all the behavioral techniques and algorithms. Instead, program the brain with the basics, eating, drinking, sleeping, walking, and that kind of thing.And then add a special behavior whose function is to learn new behaviors, a behavior to learn behaviors.
What a concept.”
It was after this, as I alluded to in the introduction that Crawford inspired me to make my first in-depth games. And while those games were nakedly commercial, not exactly the types of games Crawford would make himself, I can’t deny that he had a huge impact on my desire to make those games in the first place, and likewise his drive the forge his own way and follow his own dream, has been a huge inspiration for me since.
Over the past 17 years, through multiple iterations of Storytron a return to Siboot, and his last finished game in the genre, Le Morte De Arthur Chris Crawford has tried to create tools and experiences that that bring the concept of complex, interpersonal relationships into the world of games and interactivity.. But still, The results have not lived up to his expectations,
He wrote on his blog
In the Jul 29, 2025 “End Of An Era”
“ I spent about ten years on Storytron and a great deal of my money hiring contractors to do some of the work that I couldn’t do. And it was all for nothing. Storytron was just too complicated for the audience. I don’t think that was because it was intrinsically too complicated for anybody to understand. My impression is that there just weren’t any people willing to make the big commitment required to learn how to use Storytron. It was easier to learn than professional programming systems like Eclipse or the Microsoft suite of software development applications. But it demanded more of its users than they were willing to invest.”
In blog post from his website dated June 29, 2025 named “The End Of An Era” , after taking his final design of huis interactive function engine to an interactive fiction conference and receiving no response:“And so it is time for me to admit that, after all those decades of work, I have failed, with the single exception of Le Morte d’Arthur. When I designed for myself, I succeeded. When I designed for others, I failed. It’s time to throw in the towel and leave interactive storytelling to others. I don’t think that the world is ready.” .
End of An Era | Interactive Storytelling Tools for Writers | Chris Crawford
You can still play Crawford’s last finished game, Le Morte De Arthur, online.It was a strange but fully enjoyable experience. It feels exactly like you expected: a text-based version of Excalibur mixed with the social aspects of Gossip and political intrigue of Balance Of Power, but taken to an almost extreme level. If you’d like to see the mind of genius expressing itself after 40 years of frustration, I suggest you play the game now, before it goes away forever.
In that final blog, Chris Crawford explained the game like this:“in 2020, for my 70th birthday, I realized that I was growing old and would not be able to handle a tough technical challenge for much longer. I therefore decided that the time had come for me to make one last effort, and that effort had to an Arthurian game. I re-read the many Arthurian books I had accumulated during previous efforts, girded my loins, and set to work. I made many changes along the way; the final version of Le Morte d’Arthur was quite unlike the original. But it worked. I knew that, after all these years, I had finally achieved my goal of making genuine interactive art. I was proud, tired, and gratified. Not many people played the storyworld, but I didn’t care. That was the world’s failure, not mine. ”
I experienced Le Morte De Arthur for an extended time when it first came out. It was a fascinating mix of story, dialogue and choices where the outcome was not easy to foresee. As it progresses, the options get more and more intricate, and the situations tangled, and murky. There are no puzzles or enemies, just choices that lead to more choices and more. While playing, I could not help but feel like Crawford had finally achieved what he set-out to do 40 years before.
The legendary Alan Kaye asked Crawford to “dream” in Atari Research, and that is exactly what he did. Removed from the trappings of what made a “game” a “game”, with no rules and only his intellect and wonder to drive him, Chris Crawford, the first auteur game designer set out to make experiences that were based on People, Not Things. It was a winding path, and even if few people saw the results, he finally achieved what he set out to do…The title page for Le Morte De’ Arthur includes the following words that are pure CrawfordArthur:“It’s not a game. It’s not interactive fiction. It’s not a puzzle. It’s not action-packed. It’s not fun. If you’re a gamer, you’ll hate it and should not play it. If you like interactive fiction, you probably won’t like it
It’s mostly text, with some illustrations.
It’s art.”
”
While Chris Crawford does not think his life’s work amounted to anything, I would beg to differ in the loudest and most obvious way.My own games, once purely commercial efforts, now just hobby experiments, have taken a turn as I reach the age Crawford was when I first met him. For instance, the Worst Game, an Atari 2600 title designed to defend the competence of early Atari 2600 programmers, while Balance, an Atari 7800 experiment designed as a way to deal with the death of my childhood friend, Brandon. These efforts are ostensibly about People, not things and oddly enough, I never realized the connection to Crawford until this very moment Even if the evidence of my own inspiration from him is not enough, I think game developers of today could use his writing, thoughts and theories to advance their own ideas and methods on game design.
To me, Crawford was many things: One of the first real indie game developers, one of the first authors who wrote about how to make games, one of the first designers who truly strove to make games that could be art, one of the first people to strive for the democratization of game development, and one of the first to see a dark path forward for the AAA Game industry
Notice, not one of these is “failure”Crawford is one of my true heroes, but that’s not enough in this situationHis ideas on games thrive today, as the major players in the game industry falter from churning out the same content over and over, while indie games thrive on itch.io, steam, and in homebrew circles. Games now can come in any and all idea are presented in very artistic and non-conformists way, many of them built with tools designed so every person can have the chance to make games.I know these are the exact same things as “real interactive storytelling” that Crawford wanted but it doesn’t mean he’s failed..Maybe he thinks he’s failed because Large Language Models appear to do some the same interactive fiction functions he was trying to build, but in reality, that is far from the truth. LLMs are surface level, operate on statistics, and can only provide a very thin and unrewarding experience without heavy intervention from a story design tool like Storytron.. What an LLM can produce on its own is nothing like the like 5-8 hour, engrossing story of something like “Le Mort D’rthur”
.While his latest work may not have lived up to his own expectations, “a failure” is not how I would describe Chris Crawford.
A man cannot judge his entire life on just the last thing he tried to build.He needs to judge himself on his total affect on other people.
People over things.
And for me, and for the legacy of Atari and the computer game industry
I believe that net total affect
Has been overwhelmingly positive
And no matter what happened with storytron
That’s *not* failure
BecauseIn his assessment of his own work,Going against everything he knows to be true
By saying he failed.Crawford has prioritized Things like StorytronOver the People who have learned from and been inspired by himAnd that’s the Enigma of Chris Crawford
-Steve Fulton
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