Bob Whitehead worked for Atari in the late 1970s, developing games for the Atari 2600. Eventually, he and others felt they were not getting enough recognition for their work. Whitehead and some other colleagues ( David Crane, Alan Miller and Larry Kaplan) left Atari, and co-founded Activision, the first third-party video game developer. (A third-party video game developer is a company that produces games for a console that is the intellectual property of another company)
Whitehead developed the “Venetian blinds” animation technique, a technique that reused sprites (a 2D or 3D image or animation) several times. To give the illusion that the system had more than the maximum number of sprites allowed by the hardware.
In 1984, he and Alan Miller 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 later changed its subsidiary's name to Atari Inc
Software Highlights from Credited Titles
Bob Whitehead's first video game work that SPOnG is aware of is the 1981 title, "Skiing" (Atari 2600/VCS) as Programmer.
Bob's most recent involvement was as Lead Programmer on the 1987 release "4th & Inches" (C64).
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