Activision Publishing, Inc.
Overview
Founded in 1979 by 4 programmers at
Atari after they wanted more money and more recognition for the games that they have created, considering that the 4 of them made over 60% of the company's sales at the time.
David Crane,
Alan Miller ,
Robert Whitehead,
Larry Kaplan and former record industry executive Jim Levy founded the company, and their games would have a biography and their signature at the end of the instruction booklets. This took off, and Activision made millions in sales.
The name of the company was chosen because they wanted a name that was higher up alphabetically than Atari in order to show that it was superior.
In 1984, sales began to fall as the video game crash happened (in late 1983), there was a split on the direction of the company on whether to keep going with video games or computer games. Over the next few year, key employees at Activision left and formed their own companies. Many of these new companies chose names alphabetically above Activision (such as
Accolade,
Acclaim and
Absolute Entertainment). With sales dropping and Jim Levy's style of crediting individuals in the games becoming less effective, he left the company in 1985.
In 1989, they started focusing on other computer software and changed their name to
Mediagenic. In 1991, Mediagenic filed for bankruptcy, eventually they changed their name back to Activision, and in 1993, they surfaced again. Since then, Activision has been turned into the second largest publishing company in the United States. Today the formal company name is Activision Publishing, Inc.
In 2008, the company was acquired for $18.8 billion dollars by
Vivendi, a media conglomerate. The new name of the company is
Activision Blizzard, as Vivendi already owned
Blizzard Entertainment. The idea of this acquisition was to make Activision Blizzard the biggest, and most profitable game publishing company in the world.
Also Known As
- Activision, Inc. (from 1992 to Jun 08, 2000)
- Mediagenic (from 1988 to 1992)
- Activision, Inc. (from 1979 to 1988)
Trivia
Contact information (2008):
Activision
3100 Ocean Park Blvd.
Santa Monica, California 90405
Sales phone: 310-255-2000
Sales fax: 310-255-2166
Company phone: 310-255-2000
Company Fax: 310-255-2166
Company email: recruiting@activision.com
Contact: Claudia Franco
Recruiter, University Relations
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