Bob Whitehead

Robert A. Whitehead (born November 1, 1953) is an American video game designer and programmer. While working for Atari, Inc. he wrote two of the nine Atari Video Computer System launch titles: Blackjack and Star Ship. After leaving Atari, he cofounded third party video game developer Activision, then Accolade. He left the video game industry in the mid-1980s.

Career

Whitehead attended San Jose State University and received a BS in Mathematics.

Whitehead worked for Atari in the late 1970s developing games for the Atari 2600 (or VCS for video computer system). There, he developed several games, including a VCS implementation of chess, a feat many other programmers considered impossible for the system. He and his co-workers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, and Alan Miller became informally known as the "Gang of Four", a group of developers who felt inadequately compensated for their work despite being collectively responsible for 60 percent of the company's profits from VCS cartridge sales.

Whitehead is sometimes credited as co-author, together with the rest of the Gang of Four, of the operating system for the Atari 400/800 computers. It has been however clarified both by Al Miller and by Whitehead himself that he was not involved in the OS development, although he took part in developing applications for the computers.

Eventually the Gang of Four, disgruntled by the management's decline to provide more recognition and fair compensation to the developers, decided to leave Atari and start their own business. Whitehead together with Miller, Crane and Kaplan co-founded Activision, the first third-party video game developer, in October 1979.

There, with others, he created a VCS development system with an integrated debugger and minicomputer-hosted assembler. It was used for most of Activision's VCS titles. He also developed a "venetian blinds" animation technique: an algorithm that horizontally reused and vertically interlaced sprites several times while rendering each frame, to give the illusion that the system had more than the maximum number of sprites allowed by the hardware.

In 1984, he and other founders of Activision became disillusioned with their company. Their stock had dwindled in value and morale was low. They thought that diversification to the home computer market — such as with the Commodore 64 — was the key to success. He left Activision with Alan Miller (another co-founder of Activision), and they founded Accolade. Soon after, Whitehead left the video game industry for good.

Whitehead left in order to "give back to God and spend time with 'the fam'". After leaving Accolade, Whitehead says he helped with "low income families, getting non-profit religious start-ups going, [and] spending time in the garden."

In a 2005 interview, Whitehead said of the contemporary state of the industry:

Games

Atari 2600
 Home Run (Atari)
 Football (Atari)
 Blackjack (Atari)
 Casino (Atari)
 Star Ship (Atari)
 Video Chess (Atari)
 Boxing (Activision)
 Stampede (Activision)
 Chopper Command (Activision)
 Private Eye (Activision)
 Skiing (Activision)
 Sky Jinks (Activision)
 Venetian Blinds (Activision)

Commodore 64
 4th & Inches (Accolade)
 HardBall! (Accolade)

Notes

References

External links

Whitehead's library of work for the Atari 2600

Activision employees
American video game designers
Video game programmers
Living people
Atari people
1953 births
Game Developers Conference Pioneer Award recipients
San Jose State University alumni