There's a bunch of things that might cause it...
- Do you have DirectX installed? I think the game uses Dx9, and Dx11 should be backwards-compatible, but I'm not sure.
- Do you have enough RAM and VRAM? I assume you do, since the typical GM requirements aren't that high, but if you try running the game on an office-level computer it might have the bare minimum.
- Do you have an audio device? There was a bug that caused the GM runner to crash if no audio device was found; most systems will set up a dummy software audio device even if you don't have any speakers connected but not all of them will.
- It might be a 32-bit vs 64-bit architecture issue, Windows doesn't handle that very well.
(The standalone is a GM8.1 game, so it's a bit archaic, but it really shouldn't crash)
Some things you could try is running the game in compatibility mode for an earlier windows version (and try both with and without the flag for 32-bit emulation if you're on a 64-bit machine), and run it from the command line to see if its exit status is something like "out of memory" or "segmentation fault" which could help troubleshooting the problem.