Career
Miller joined Atari, Inc. in February 1977 and was one of the first four Atari 2600 game designers. His 2600 titles include Surround, Hunt & Score, Hangman and Basketball. With others, he co-authored the operating system for the Atari 400/800/1200 computers in late 1978 and early 1979. His last game for Atari, Basketball, was one of the first ROM games for the Atari computers.
In late 1979, Miller left Atari with three other programmers, David Crane, Larry Kaplan and Bob Whitehead. They were disillusioned and disappointed with Atari's refusal to give them screen credit for any of the games they worked on. With music industry executive, Jim Levy, they formed Activision, the first independent video game developer and publisher. Activision rapidly grew to USD$159 million in revenue in 1983, its third year of sales. Miller acted as Vice President of Product Development and designed several of the company's first games. Among his games designed while with Activision are Checkers, Tennis, Ice Hockey, Starmaster and Robot Tank.
Miller and Whitehead thought that diversification to other platforms, such as the home computers like the Commodore 64, was essential for success. Activision was resistant to this idea, so he and Whitehead left Activision in 1984 and together formed the game publisher Accolade. While with his new company, he designed only one game, Law of the West for the Commodore 64. Accolade quickly became known for their pioneering and high-quality titles. Miller started as Vice President of Product Development but in a few years rose to Chairman and CEO.
After ten years at Accolade, Miller left in 1994. Ironically, Accolade hit hard times and in 1999 and was purchased by Infogrames, which later changed its subsidiarie's names to Atari Inc., Atari Europe, Atari Australia, and Atari Japan respectively.
In September 2001, Miller rejoined David Crane at Crane's company, Skyworks Technologies, a leading developer of custom branded online games (advergames) for Fortune 100 companies, where he served as Vice President of Business Development for four years.
Read more about this topic: Alan Miller (game Designer)
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