Alcatraz was formed in 1988 from the ashes of the more strangely named "Motley Crue Team", by Metalwar (Code, Music), Helix (Gfx) and PGCS (Gfx).

Metalwar was the mastermind behind most of the first productions of the group, until the time of Mega Demo 2, when new creative members like Hornet of Avengers joined Alcatraz.

After Mega Demo 3, Metalwar started to work on his dream Amiga game, codenamed "Ilyad". This shoot 'em up was eventually released in 1989 by UbiSoft. One year later, Metalwar and Helix decided to leave both the group and the scene, leaving PGCS heading the group.

The highlight of the group from the Amiga era must surely be the "Odyssey" demo (a scene first, spanning five 880K floppies and running for 33 minutes), which won the competition at the first The Party event in 1991! The groups' success attracted a number of members from "Coma" who brought along the diskmag "McDisk" as an added bonus. The Swiss section still headed by PGCS moved away from the scene and started working for game companies, while PGCS himself opened a software shop.

The McDisk project slowly faded away, however, a new mag "Compass" saw the light of the day with Disney and ex-McDisk man Mop as editors. The mag received rave reviews, but just after one released issue Mop left for Essence to conceive "R.O.M".

Disney who was the Alcatraz WHQ asked Sting to join as swapper and organizer of the German part of the group. Some months later Disney left for Sanity to start a new mag project, which unfortunately never happened. The rest of the Austrians, Quedex, Poseidon and Pigment decided to take over the WHQ as they were all in close contact studying together.

Soon after they started working for game companies (Oldtimer, Cedric) so they offered Sting to organize the Alcatraz WHQ. Several productions were planed. Surprisingly the Swiss section, who had been quite dormant, released the demo "Ilyad" at the Assembly 1994 and declared that there should be no more members except from the Swiss. Although Sting was the WHQ he decided to leave on his own accord and joined Abyss to avoid any stress with the remaining founders.

Quedex, Poseidon and Pigment stayed in Alcatraz to continue their work as Alcatraz Entertainment Software. Together with TRSI they released their last scene production "Cyberlogik" at The Party 1995 in Denmark.

Once again they asked Sting to continue Alcatraz as a scene group, but he was taking a scene break after his days in Abyss. The Odyssey of Alcatraz ended here...

The game making firm Alcatraz Entertainment Software with Quedex, Poseidon, Pigment and Brainbug lived until 2003.

In 2007 Alcatraz was reborn on the PC platform with full consensus and permission from original founder PGCS. Some old and new talented sceners teamed up and some nice releases followed.