Accolade

From Sega Retro

Accolade, Inc., later known as Infogrames North America, Inc., was an American video game development company.

Company

Sega's TradeMark Security System pushed the company to reverse engineer the Genesis, and eventually led to a high-profile lawsuit in 1992.[7]

Accolade was formed in 1984 by two of the founders of Activision; Alan Miller and Robert Whitehead, with a name chosen because it was alphabetically higher name than both Activision and Atari. It would begin to release games in 1986, starting with baseball simulation HardBall! for home computers, which would go on to sell 250,000 units in the US[8].

Programmer David Galloway recalls Accolade initially being set up as a flat hierarchy, in which staff were afforded a great deal of individual freedom. In particular, developers had to pitch their own games, assemble their own teams, and largely find their own work to do.[9]

The company originally produced games for the home microcomputer market, but as the popularity of those systems waned, Accolade focused on PC and console development, including the NES, Mega Drive, SNES and PlayStation during those systems' popularity. All of Accolade's initial titles were developed in-house, but being a publisher as well as a developer, Accolade began to publish titles produced by other developers as well. By the mid-1990s, most of Accolade software development was done by third-party developers.

In October 1991, Accolade was served with a lawsuit regarding copyright infringement that eventually led to the concept of reverse engineering for interoperability purposes. Sega wanted to keep a hold on their consoles, and wanted all its games exclusive to Sega. Unwilling to conform to single platform use, Accolade engineers researched through reverse engineering on a way to produce titles for the Sega platform. Sega sued Accolade over the practice and won an initial injunction, forcing Accolade to remove all Genesis product from store shelves. Accolade, however, won on appeal and reached an out of court settlement with Sega that allowed Accolade to continue building their own Genesis cartridges but as an official licensee — however, Accolade still continued to produce unlicensed games (primarily those co-published with Ballistic).

Accolade did well in its early years, but by the 1990s, Accolade's sales suffered and management was forced to enact several rounds of lay-offs. Accolade was the entry point for Infogrames' North America expansion. The company was later renamed to Infogrames North America, Inc. and published Infogrames' games for the US market from then on. In 2000 Infogrames North America merged with Infogrames, Inc. and therefore Infogrames North America were folded into the latter.

In 2013, Tommo, Inc. acquired almost all of Accolade's properties from Atari during the bankruptcy sale, and the Accolade brand name now lives on in the hands of Tommo and publisher Billionsoft but in 2023, Atari purchased over 100 titles from Billionsoft, including the Accolade library and name.

Softography

Mega Drive

Game Gear

Saturn

Dreamcast

References

NEC Retro has more information related to Accolade
  1. ↑ http://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/company/accolade/ (Wayback Machine: 2015-09-06 22:34)
  2. ↑ https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=01533288-3776761 (Wayback Machine: 2021-10-16 20:07)
  3. ↑ https://businesssearch.sos.ca.gov/Document/RetrievePDF?Id=01533288-7050133 (Wayback Machine: 2021-10-16 22:09)
  4. ↑ Electronic Gaming Retail News, "January 1992" (US; 199x-xx-xx), page 20
  5. ↑ Summer CES Directory, page 128
  6. ↑ File:Zero Tolerance MD US Manual.pdf, page 40
  7. ↑ Sega v. Accolade
  8. ↑ GAMESMACHINE, "20", page 71
  9. ↑ 2025-07-20 correspondence between Ashley Rojas and David Galloway.
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