Editing Little Computer People (section)

==Development==
The initial idea for ''Little Computer People'' was developed by Rich Gold, who wanted to create a Pet Person computer program similar to that of the [[Pet Rock]] toys of the 1970s. Gold was able to develop some funding for it and hired James Wickstead Design Associates to realize it as a game concept which was in development for about a year.{{sfn|Wild|p=34}}{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=107}} This team refined the concept of a Pet Person who lived in a house.{{sfn|Wild|p=34}} Gold initially struggled to find a publisher for the product.{{sfn|Wild|p=34}}{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}} At this point, the game was like screensaver, that the players would be able to [[Booting|boot]] and just see what the character was doing.{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}} Gold met with [[Activision]] president [[Jim Levy]] was an interesting enough product to show to game developer [[David Crane (programmer)|David Crane]], who had popular hits with games like ''[[Pitfall!]]'' (1982) and ''[[Ghostbusters (1984 video game)|Ghostbusters]]'' (1984) for his opinion.{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=105}}{{sfn|Wild|p=34}} At this point in time, Activision was one of the largest video game publishers in the industry.{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}} Crane said he offered to take on the project, but not as a finished game for publishing but as a starting point for an interactive product.{{sfn|Wild|p=34}} Crane saw the project as going beyond the Pet rock concept in what Crane described as "one of the hardest programming challenges of my career."{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}} Crane wanted to add interactivity and argued with Gold with this concept, who said it was contrary to the initial Pet Rock concept.{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}} Crane later recalled in 2005 that "Part of me wanted to make him the smartest thing in computing maybe even to pass the [[Turing test]] — but with the constraints of time in the software business that was impractical."{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}} Including the development of James Wickstead Design Associates, the game took about two years to develop in a period when most games were developed in four to five months.{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=107}} 

Crane made the game so that each copy of it would be unique. Each copy of the game had built in parameters that gave the character a unique personality and mood parameters.{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}} He stated that this turned out to be one of the important aspects of the game as based on his personality and mood, the character could opt to ignore your commands.{{sfn|Mott|2005|p=106}}
While the game has the character live off a real-time six hour game schedule for a day, Crane thought it may have been better to have the character live off of a real-time schedule such as booting the game up at night would have the character sleeping.{{sfn|Wild|p=35}} 

Playing cards with the character was almost not included due to a lack of time according to Crane, who said that nearly all the time was focused on giving the character interactivity with its basic brain.{{sfn|Wild|p=33}} [[Steve Cartwright]] was between games when the development of ''Little Computer People'' was closing, with Crane giving Cartwright the parameters to include the card game feature.{{sfn|Wild|p=34}} Marketing staff at Activision formulated promotion through a newspaper story about the discovery of people living in computers everywhere.{{sfn|Wild|p=35}}