★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ SOFTOGRAPHIE ★ DAVID CRANE ★ |
| David Crane | Games - Auteurs |
The bank buster Christina Erskine talks to David Crane of Activision With Ghostbusters continuing to top the charts on both its Commodore 64 and Spectrum editions, its designer and writer David Crane slipped into this country for a couple of days during the LET Show. David commands the sort of status in the US that Jeff Minter and Matthew Smith do over here; he has carved out a selective kind of fame for himself and his creations. While Commodore 64 users will probably know David as the author of Ghostbusters, - primarily - Pitfall and Decathlon, David actually has around ten titles under his belt, and was a founder member of Activision five years ago. I went to see David at Activision's London headquarters - the offices are pretty spacious, but David, at six foot, managed to make them look quite pokey. Somehow he just doesn't look like what a computer programmer is supposed to look like. How'd it happen? "I was always very keen on electronics at High School in Indiana -1 took lots of extra courses in computing and electronics, so I could program fluently in three different languages by the time I left. It really started when I designed a tic-tac-toe playing computer when I was about thirteen." Tick-tac-toe, incidentally, is American for Noughts and Crosses. After college David worked for an electronics firm, designing microchips. A friend, who was developing video games for Atari, tried to convince David that this was what he should be doing. "I was suspicious of the idea, because all that programming involved didn't appeal. But then, I thought, well, games designing sounds like fun, so I took the job. "Now people tend to be quite envious when I tell them I play and write games for a living. Especially, when I tell them that I judge how well I've done on the game, by how much I enjoy playing it." After two years with Atari, David helped start up Activision, and continued writing a number of games for the Atari VCS system - Dragster, Laser Blast. Grand Prix among them. "I usually spend about eight months writing a program, and about half of that time is spent on the finishing touches and debugging. But with such a long development time, it means I have to look ahead to what will be innovative in a year's time. "For instance when everyone was bringing out space attack games - and I've written quite a few of those -1 would have to look elsewhere for my next idea, because by the time it was finished space games would be out of fashion. I've now programmed just about every type of game - except adventures. But race games, driving games, space games, arcade strategy, yes. The other constraint I have is that I'll never do two of the same format in a row, or I get bored with the repetition." With Ghostbusters, however, David broke several of his previous traditions. "For a start, I was told 1 had six weeks to do the game. I said there were was no way I could do an entire game in six weeks, so for the first time, we involved other people in the project and it became a team effort. Usually at Activision, a project is one person's from start to finish. However, the team idea worked so well on Ghostbusters that I reckon we'll do that for all the future programs." Part of Ghostbusters is in fact a quite different game David was working on before he took on the project. "Before the movie came out, I had been playing around on screen with an idea for a game. I had a car, viewed from above, travelling through various streets, and a screen whereby you could load the car with weapons with a fork-lift truck. I thought maybe the weapons could be used against various baddies the car came across in the streets. "Unbeknownst to me, Activision was talking to Columbia Pictures about Ghostbusters even then. "When I was told Activision was going to do the Ghostbusters game, and that it had to be done in six weeks, I was lucky. I'd just seen the movie, and I realised straight away that I should be able to work my car in the streets screens to fit into the game somewhere. I went to see the movie again the night I was asked, and then it was head down to get it worked out from then on. "I sat down with the Ghostbusters brief, and got the gist of the game defined on the first day. Firstly I had some useful screens, secondly I had to construct something similar to the movie and using features from it, I had to add some comic overtones to tie in with the humour of the movie, and I wanted to design something that would stand up on its own, with or without the movie tie-up. "I tried to get the humour in with things like the ghost vacuums and marshmallow sensors. "I wanted to use the movie's theme music to run through the game, which wasn't too difficult. Then I felt that if we could include the lyrics from Ray Parker Jnr's hit, it would add another fun element to the program, and that's where the bouncing ball came in. The speech synthesis, however, is not David's, but done by a separate company, Electronic Speech Systems, based in Berkeley in California. "Again, the main reason we used it was that it was another aspect of the fun in the game; also we felt it was valuable in order to demonstrate that you can implement that quality of speech in a computer game." So how does David intend to follow an act like Ghostbustert? "I honestly don't know at the moment - I haven't got a game in development at present. I'm trying to promote this team format we used for Ghostbusters within Activision, so that we can do it on future releases. Whatever 1 do next, it'll be another product in the entertainment software field, although the concept of entertainment is broadening widely. Presumably any future work by David will be influenced the US hardware market - how popular the new Atari and Commodore machines prove, for example? "Well. I don't know about that. Activision has the advantage of being a software only company. While I feel that long term there is a growth market for computers. 1 really don't care which companies are battling for shares. "The C128 is said to be a Commodore 64 with extra features, but if Activision produce games for it using those features, we ought to try to do it so that it could run on the 64 as well, because of its huge user base. "As for the new Ataris, well, I'll believe them when I see them. There is one hell of a lot of rubber-gloved respect for Jack Tramiel in the States, and there's no doubt there has to be a good market for a machine with the power of a Mac at a third of the price."
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