Robert A. Whitehead (born November 1, 1953) is an Americanvideo game designer andprogrammer. While working forAtari, Inc. he wrote two of the nineAtari Video Computer System launch titles:Blackjack andStar Ship. After leaving Atari, he cofounded third party video game developerActivision, thenAccolade. He left the video game industry in the mid-1980s.
Whitehead attendedSan Jose State University and received aBS in Mathematics.[1]
Whitehead worked forAtari, Inc. in the late 1970s developing games for the Video Computer System (later renamed to theAtari 2600). He developed several games, including a VCS implementation ofchess, a feat many other programmers considered impossible for the system.[1] He and his co-workersDavid Crane,Larry Kaplan, andAlan 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.[2]
Whitehead is sometimes credited as co-author, together with the rest of the Gang of Four, of the operating system for theAtari 400/800 computers.[a] It has been however clarified both by Al Miller[7] and by Whitehead himself[citation needed] 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-foundedActivision, the first third-party video game developer, in October 1979.[1]
There, with others, he created a VCS development system with an integrateddebugger andminicomputer-hostedassembler. It was used for most of Activision's VCS titles. He also developed a "venetian blinds" animation technique: analgorithm that horizontally reused and vertically interlacedsprites 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.[citation needed] Theirstock had dwindled in value and morale was low. They thought that diversification to thehome computer market — such as with theCommodore 64 — was the key to success. He left Activision with Alan Miller (another co-founder of Activision), and they foundedAccolade. Soon after, Whitehead left thevideo game industry for good.[1]
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."[1]
In a 2005 interview,[8] Whitehead said of the contemporary state of the industry:
Too dark and derivative for my taste. The console and computer gaming business is too narrowly defined by the 14 [year old] male mentality and all his not-so-honorable fantasies. It's being driven by what has worked and afraid of what a 10 million dollar development bust will entail. It has lost its moral compass.[1]
There is a period at Atari when there were no games coming from Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, and myself. As the most senior designers at Atari we were tasked with creating the 800 operating system. This group, plus two others, wrote the entire operating system in about 8 months.
You know we had a - I guess that we had the four of us - Larry Kaplan, Al Miller, Bob Whitehead and myself; we had a couple of contractors who were brought in who had done communications with hard drives and things, floppy disks, things like that.
BIOS Software: Al Miller, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Bob Whitehead & Howard Bornstein
{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: location (link)So there's this one year period where Atari actually took its most productive VCS programmers and put them on the 400/800 computer. I'd say most productive with the exception of Bob [Whitehead] - Bob continued to work on VCS carts.