Lovely, cuddly David Crane.
The creator of Pitfall! chats with you about how he left Atari to co-found Activision, the world’s first third-party games publisher, and how he had to build an Atari development kit from scratch.
“And do you know who else came up with an Atari dev kit completely independently?” he says. “My good pal Garry Kitchen!”
And here he is, Garry Kitchen! Garry and David founded the publisher Absolute Entertainment in the 1980s (so named because Absolute would appear ahead of Activision in any directories).
But before that, Garry worked out how to create a dev kit for the Atari 2600 all by himself, hooking it up to an Apple II with this crazy contraption:
Very clever.
Garry got started in the games industry at the electronics firm Wickstead Design Associates, where he was given the task of programming the electronic pinball game Wildfire for Parker Brothers in just six weeks. Hmmm, that sounds important, better pop that information in your knapsack.
“Hey,” says David, “Want to see something really cool that I’ve made?”
“Sure”, you reply, as you follow David behind a large paisley curtain at the end of the room.
Curious Video Game Machines 