End of an Era

This feels quite sad.

Someone who clearly wanted to make a difference, but mostly seems to have not just made games.

He made game tools, but then didn't actually use them to make games. And then he blamed everyone else for not being ready for what he was making.

Giving up after only one released work just seems like such a shame.

The posts author and site operator is Chris Crawford [0]. He said so in the post but Wikipedia confirms that he was mostly active from 1980s to 1990s with at least 15 titles to his name, not including other tools that he built and not including game design books that he authored or wrote for.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Crawford_(game_designer)

This feels quite sad.

A whole person -- flattened into little bits gleaned from some text, glued together with assumptions and world-building -- dismissed as "blaming" and "giving up" "after one game"

The YouTube link in the other post has a top comment of "The best speech in all of gaming history delivered by what must be considered the Socrates of gaming.", to give you a sense of there may be more depth to this person than "giving up after 1 game".

If nothing else, it indicates the crowd perceives more depth, which will be enough to make you ponder if you missed something.

I suggest re-reading the article with a different set of assumptions -- when faced with a contradiction, first, check your premises -- it's likely the guy worried about declining programming skills and pointing out the ease at which he was dismissing JavaScript due to simple errors, is being self-aware and sarcastic.

Once you're freed via engaging with your own thinking, instead of rushing to do public judgement, it is a quite beautiful meditation of working on something that fails to get the mindshare you hoped for, and a all-too-familiar to all of us reminder of the cognitive dissonance required to be okay with that, even when you'll never be okay.

Also he says he was 70 on 2020 before embarking on some of those big projects. I hope I'm half as active then.

I just saw a gen-Z kid choose to play Ms. PacMan instead of Zaxxon. This is heresy on the level of playing Buck Hunter instead of Tempest or even Galaxian. Some games we all know but some are legend.

He definitely made games. Chris Crawford was one of the first known names in game design, a few years ahead of contemporaries like Sid Meier whom I expect you'd still recognize. Crawford seemed to alternate between computer war games, with reliable prospects for commercial success in the 80s, and more experimental fare about managing nuclear reactors, geopolitics, and such - difference being he seemed to get bored by the whole thing and completely disembarked in pursuit of whatever it was he intended to achieve via Erasmatron, Storytron, etc. It's fascinating to read his writings over that period. It seemed a sort of tragic paradox overshadowing all of it that, if he was so bored of mechanistic, algorithmic, and predictable computer game mechanics, maybe stop pursuing computer games as your chosen medium? It may have been a blind alley in the end, but someone had to explore it.

Nevertheless, it is quite sad - however, it's difficult for me to relate to the experiences of someone who lived through that first wave of personal computing and played a notable part in it - perhaps through that lens, anything was possible.