Accolade

» see accolade.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Accolade's entire run happened on hardware i did not have. Its peak was the american cartridge and floppy market of the late eighties, and i was a child in ankara for all of it. By 1998, when i finally got a modem, the company had about a year left under its own name.

It started in 1984 in San Jose, founded by Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead. Both had written games for the Atari 2600, both had walked out over credit and royalties, and both had helped found Activision in 1979 for exactly that reason. Accolade was the second time the same two people left a company over the same argument.

The catalog was ordinary and it sold. Test Drive in 1987 was a first-person driving game with no race and no opponent, just a mountain road and a police car somewhere behind you, which somehow turned out to be enough. HardBall was baseball. The Jack Nicklaus golf games ran for the better part of a decade. Star Control, made by Toys for Bob in 1990, is the one with a reputation that outlived the publisher.

Then there was Bubsy, a bobcat in an exclamation-marked shirt launched in 1993 to be Accolade's Sonic. He survives now mostly as a marker for how many mascot platformers the industry made in those years and how few of them anybody actually wanted.

~ the case file ~

~ the case ~

Sega's Genesis had a lockout. The console looked for a specific string in the cartridge header and refused to boot without it, which meant Sega decided who was allowed to publish. Accolade did not want to pay for a license, so its engineers bought a Genesis, pulled the object code off Sega's own cartridges, disassembled it, and worked out what the check was looking for.

Sega sued in 1991 for copyright and trademark infringement and won an injunction in the district court. On 20 october 1992 the Ninth Circuit reversed. The court held that copying a program in order to study the parts of it that are not protected counts as fair use, because there was no other way to reach the functional interface underneath. The two sides settled and Accolade became a licensee anyway, which is the least interesting part of the story.

~ why that mattered ~

Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510, is still cited constantly. It is the reason interoperability work has a defense in the united states: emulator development and third-party drivers, and anything else that has to watch a closed system talk before it can talk back.

A middling publisher of golf games did that. It was not trying to establish a principle. It was trying to avoid a licensing fee, which is how most of the useful law in this area got written.

~ the postmortem ~

The late nineties were bad for mid-size publishers. Accolade had no platform relationship worth much and no single franchise big enough to carry the others. In april 1999 Infogrames bought the company for fifty million dollars, largely for the sports licenses and the MLB deal attached to HardBall.

Infogrames renamed it Infogrames North America and finished folding it in on 3 october 2000. The Accolade name simply stopped being used after that. Test Drive carried on without it, through Infogrames and then Atari, and sits with Nacon now.

~ what happened to the name ~

Trademarks outlive the companies that earn them. When the american Atari arm went bankrupt in 2013 the Accolade assets went to Tommo, and the trademark landed with Billionsoft in 2017. In april 2023 Atari bought back over a hundred Accolade titles. The catalog has changed hands repeatedly since the company that made it stopped existing.

Bubsy has been revived twice by people who owned the rights and thought there was something there. There was not. The thing worth inheriting from Accolade was never in the catalog. It was in a federal reporter.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »