New Job Quote by David Crane

Crane’s little shrug of a confession lands like an origin story without the hero lighting. The “hesitant” opener isn’t modesty so much as a snapshot of a moment when the rules of tech work hadn’t calcified yet: you could plausibly think building circuits was the “real” fun, while programming sounded like clerical labor. That inversion is the point. In the late 1970s, software wasn’t yet the glamorous locus of power it is now; it was closer to an accessory for the hardware, a necessary nuisance that made the machine do something.

The line also carries a quiet class-of-work anxiety: “programmed for a living” implies crossing from tinkering to wage labor, from curiosity to deliverables. He’s admitting fear of boredom not because he lacked imagination, but because early game development at a company like Atari could look like repetition under tight constraints, not the romantic “creative coding” myth we project backward.

Then comes the sly turn: “But I would probably still be in the video game business.” It reads like fate, but it’s really a claim about inevitability in a nascent industry. Crane helped define what a “video game professional” even was, and his hindsight suggests the medium had enough gravitational pull that the specific toolset (circuits vs. code) mattered less than the cultural explosion around games. The subtext is a reframing of career choice as historical current: you don’t just pick Atari; you get swept into the coming century’s entertainment engine.