Founded By: Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead Location: 5300 Stevens Creek Blvd., Suite 500, San Jose, California, 95129 USA Year Started: 1983 Year Wound Up: 1999 Titles in Database: 87 Rights Now With: Infogrames (1999)

Accolade was an American video game developer and publisher of the 1980s and 1990s. Headquartered in San Jose, California, it was founded in 1984 by game industry veterans Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead. Miller and Whitehead founded Accolade after leaving another game developer and publisher they had founded, Activision, the world's first third-party game developer. The 'Accolade' name was chosen mostly on the basis that their former place of employment (Activision to be specific) was based on an alphabetically higher name than Atari (which both of them worked at before co-founding Activision), and they wanted their name to be above Activision. Accolade was a success early on, due to their technical prowess, and many former Activision employees coming over to the company. Accolade's luck would turn around in the early 1990s due to the small recession. The company's sales declined, Alan Miller left (in 1994), and it was only five years later that they were acquired by Infogrames (which ironically changed their name to Atari in 2003, the name of the company the co-founders started at). They were also involved in an unprecedented lawsuit between them and Sega over licensing issues with the Sega Genesis and re-engineering the Genesis to bypass the lockout chips that ensure Sega's licensing of the games.