Bob Whitehead

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bob Whitehead is an American game designer and programmer . He is one of the pioneers in the video game industry.

career

Whitehead worked for the Atari company in the late 1970s, developing games for the Atari 2600 . These included titles such as Chess and other games which, in their complex game structure, could not actually be implemented on the technically limited Atari 2600 game console. Like some other game developers at Atari, Whitehead felt that Atari was being treated unfairly; for example, the name of the developer of a game could not be mentioned there. Finally, Whitehead and other colleagues ( Alan Miller , David Crane and Larry Kaplan ) left Atari and founded Activision with them in 1979 to develop games for video game consoles.

At Activision, Whitehead and other employees developed a development system for the Atari 2600 game console, which included a debugger and only worked in conjunction with a minicomputer. This system was used to develop most of Activision's games for the Atari 2600 game console. Whitehead also developed the venetian blinds animation technique for the system , which made sprites reusable so that more sprites could be used within a game than were originally intended in the console system. This technique is still used very often in game development today.

In 1984 Whitehead and other founders of Activision no longer agreed with company policy. Activision's stock prices had fallen sharply and the company's morale was poor. Whitehead was convinced that a move towards the successful home computer market like the C64 would be more successful. So he and Alan Miller left the company and founded Accolade . A little later Whitehead gave up working in the video game industry entirely. Ironically, Accolade was soon bought by Infogrames , which soon after changed its name to Atari SA .

Bob Whitehead video games

Atari 2600

Commodore 64

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Whitehead, Bob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Whitehead, Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American video game developer and programmer
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century