Bob Whitehead

Bob Whitehead is a game designer and programmer. He is a renowned pioneer and entrepreneur of the video game industry, having been instrumental in forming two video game developers. One, Activision, was the first third-party video game developer.

Career

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. [http://www.digitpress.com/library/interviews/interview_bob_whitehead.html Interview with Bob Whitehead] from DigitPress.com] Eventually he and others felt that they were not receiving fair compensation for their work, specifically, Atari refused to include credits for the developers in their games. Whitehead and a few other colleagues (Alan Miller, David Crane and Larry Kaplan) left and co-founded Activision, the first third-party video game developer.

There, with others, he developed a custom VCS development system, that integrated a debugger and required a minicomputer to run. It was used for most of Activision's VCS titles. He also developed a pioneering "venetian blinds" animation technique, an algorithim that reused sprites several times while rendering, to give the illusion that the system had more than the maximum number of sprites allowed by the hardware. The "venetian blinds" term refers to a demo he developed to showcase the technique which showed venetian blinds opening in front of a window (each slat in the blind was the same sprite, "stampted" in a different position). This technique is still used extensively today in game programming.

In 1984, he and other founders of Activision became disillusioned with their company. Their stock had dwindled in value and morale was low. They also thought that diversification to the home computer market—such as with the Commodore 64—was the key to success. So he left Activision with Alan Miller (another co-founder of Activision) and co-founded Accolade. However, soon after the founding of Accolade, Whitehead left the video game industry for good. Ironically, Accolade was later acquired by Infogrames, which shortly afterwards changed their name to Atari.

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

Of the current state of the industry, Whitehead said that it's:

He said he may return to the industry to develop games for cell phones since half that audience is female (and thus will allow him to develop games that do not feed into what he perceives as the juvenile male mentality).

Titles

VCS/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)

Commodore 64

* "4th & Inches" (Accolade)
* "Hardball" (Accolade)

References

External links

*moby developer|id=167861|name=Bob Whitehead's profile
* [http://www.atariage.com/programmer_page.html?SystemID=2600&ProgrammerID=14 Whitehead's library of work for the Atari 2600]