I missed this back when it was originally published (on my birthday, no less!) but this month’s issue of Game Developer magazine reprints several interviews with some of the giants of the computer game development industry from Gamasutra.com, in preparation for this month’s Game Developers Conference.
One of those interviews is with David Crane, who worked for Atari before co-founding Activision in 1979. At Activision, he worked on Pitfall! and other legendary titles.
Since the mid-1990s, he’s been involved with Skyworks Technologies, which develops advergaming and casual game applications. This is from the interview (emphasis added):
“Garry and I have designed and marketed games for every video game system since the 1970s, and we decided to treat the internet as a new game system. Our expertise making quality games for the early (small ROM) game systems would be invaluable in keeping game files small enough for modem download. We settled on Shockwave as a game design platform, a tool we had been using almost since its creation.