United States · Founded 1984 · Closed 1999 · 1984 – 1999
Two of Activision's founders walked out to start Accolade — and then won the court case that made reverse-engineering a games console legal in the United States.
Accolade was founded in San Jose in November 1984 by Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, who had co-founded Activision five years earlier after leaving Atari. Each man had now walked out of a company twice to start another one, and the pattern was consistent: both departures were about who controls the work. The catalogue that followed was broad rather than deep — Law of the West, The Dam Busters, HardBall!, Mean 18 and, in 1987, Test Drive, which built a long-running series out of the simple proposition that the car should be one you actually wanted to own. Star Control in 1990 earned the company its strongest critical notices, and Bubsy in 1993 its strongest sales. But Accolade's permanent significance is a court judgment. Wanting to publish on the Sega Genesis without accepting Sega's licensing terms, Accolade's engineers disassembled Sega's object code, worked out the functional interface a cartridge had to present to boot on the console, and wrote their own games against it, copying none of Sega's code into the finished products. Sega sued for copyright and trademark infringement and won at district level. On 20 October 1992 the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding in Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510 that intermediate copying — disassembling object code in order to read it — is fair use where it is the only way to reach functional elements that copyright does not protect in the first place. That ruling is now foundational software law, cited far outside games; a great deal of interoperability work, emulation included, rests on it. The company itself did not last: Infogrames acquired Accolade in April 1999 for $60 million and renamed it Infogrames North America.