Accolade
The company that won the right to reverse-engineer
Founded by two Activision founders, and the defendant in the 1992 case that established reverse engineering for compatibility as lawful — the reason console makers cannot control who publishes for their machines.
Accolade published sports games and simulations for fifteen years — Test Drive, HardBall!, 4th & Inches, Mini-Putt, the Jack Nicklaus golf series. It is in the Vault for something else: it went to court against Sega in 1992 and won, and the ruling is why anyone can write software for hardware they do not own.
Fast facts
- Founded: 1984 by Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, two of the four founders of Activision — who in turn had left Atari.
- Press evidence in this library: ZZAP!64 and Amiga Power, 1988–1992 — 4th & Inches, Mini-Putt, Zyconix, Waxworks, Les Manley.
- Later: bought by Infogrames in 1999, which went on to acquire the Atari name and take it as its own.
Sega v. Accolade
Accolade wanted to publish Mega Drive cartridges without paying Sega for a licence. To do that it had to work out how the console decided a cartridge was genuine, which it did by examining Sega’s own cartridges and deducing the mechanism — reverse engineering.
Sega sued, and won an injunction. Amazing Computing reported the reversal in December 1992, and stated the stakes in a way that has aged remarkably well:
Sega won an injunction against Accolade based on Accolade’s reverse engineering process, which of course is used by just about everybody in the hardware or software business… While Accolade lost the first round, they won in federal appellate court… If Sega had won, hardware companies might have been able to control development of software for their machines — a frightening prospect.
That is a contemporary judgement, not hindsight. The industry understood at the time exactly what was being decided.
What it settled
The appellate ruling held that copying code to understand how something works, where that is the only way to reach the interface, is fair use. The copy made during study is not the copy that matters; what you ship is.
Nearly everything downstream rests on it: independent cartridges and accessories, emulators, compatible file formats, interoperable hardware, and a good deal of the preservation work that keeps this era playable at all. The alternative — a world where the maker of a machine holds a veto over who may write for it — is the arrangement Nintendo had built with the Seal of Quality and the lockout chip, and it is what Sega was asking the court to bless.
Why it mattered
Accolade’s case is law as infrastructure. The eighties and nineties are usually narrated through hardware and design, but the shape of the industry was also set in courtrooms, and this case set more of it than any game Accolade published.
There is a neat closing irony in the corporate line. The company founded by Activision’s founders was eventually bought by Infogrames, a French publisher that then took the name Atari — the company the founders had left in the first place, fifteen years and one industry earlier.