Christopher Crawford (born June 1, 1950) is an American video game designer and writer.

After leaving Atari, he wrote a string of games beginning with Balance of Power for Macintosh.

In 1992, Crawford withdrew from commercial game development and began experimenting with ideas for a next generation interactive storytelling system.

In 2018, Crawford announced that he had halted his work on interactive storytelling, concluding that it will take centuries for civilization to embrace the required concepts.

Crawford first encountered computer games in Missouri, when he met someone attempting to computerize Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg.

In 1978, Crawford began selling the games and by 1979 "made the startling discovery," he later said, "that it is far more lucrative and enjoyable to teach for fun and program for money."

He joined Atari that year, founding the Games Research Group under Alan Kay in 1982.

This work led to Eastern Front (1941), which is widely considered one of the first wargames on a microcomputer to compete with traditional paper-n-pencil games in terms of depth.

[3] Eastern Front was initially published through the Atari Program Exchange, which was intended for user-written software.

He followed this with Legionnaire, based on the same display engine but adding real-time instead of turn-based game play.

Using the knowledge gathered while writing these games, he helped produce technical documentation covering the custom hardware of the Atari 8-bit computers, from the hardware-assisted smooth scrolling to digitized sounds, with the information presented in a friendly format for a wide audience.

By 1983, BYTE called Crawford "easily the most innovative and talented person working on the Atari 400/800 computer today",[5] and his name was well enough known that Avalon Hill's advertising for a revised version of Legionnaire mentioned Crawford as author.

[6] Laid off in 1984, in the collapse of Atari during the video game crash of 1983, Crawford went freelance and produced Balance of Power for the Macintosh in 1985, which was a best-seller,[2] reaching 250,000 units sold.

The first gathering was held in 1988 as salon in Crawford's living room with roughly 27 game design friends and associates.

[9] Crawford acknowledged that his views on computer game design were unusual and controversial.

I don't strive so much for simple-minded fun ... do you want a game that will punch you in the stomach or really affect you?

Computer Gaming World wrote after the 1993 conference that Crawford "has opted to focus upon a narrow niche of interactive art lovers rather than continuing to reach as many gamers as possible".

[14] Since then, Crawford has been working on Storytron (originally known as Erasmatron), an engine for running interactive electronic storyworlds.

As of December 2008[update], a beta version of the Storytronics authoring tool, Swat, has been released.

The system was officially launched March 23, 2009, with Crawford's storyworld sequel to Balance of Power.

"[16] In August 2013 Crawford released source code of several of his games from his career to the public,[17] fulfilling a 2011 given promise,[18] among them Eastern Front (1941) and Balance of Power.

All we are doing with the computer, if all we do is just reinvent the wheel with poor grade materials, well, we don't have a dream worth pursuing.

But you know, we’ve also learned to turn that concept around to use language as a way of allowing one person to teach many people.