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.