The Activision Story

Picture: Activision's founders receiveing a recent award (credit: Gamedev)

In 1979, the year of Asteroids, four of Atari's brightest stars got fed up with the mill. Amongst each other, David Crane, Bob Whitehead, Alan Miller, and Larry Kaplan were responsible for over half of Atari's home cartridge sales – yet were allowed no credit, no royalties, no individual recognition for their work, work that was quickly becoming recognized as a unique form of expression, and that clearly was of at least some value to their employer.

So, as tends to happen, they revolted. With the aid of a record executive named Jim Levy, who provided a solid background in the promotion and marketing of artists, they set up their own game studio, named Activision.

Atari went nuts, screaming of conspiracy and espionage; the Activision team played it by the book, leaving empty-handed and reverse engineering the Atari VCS themselves, to produce their own original games – thereby becoming the first third-party console developer in history. At the time, it seemed like a revolution. "The video game business went from absolutely zero designer credit to something approaching rock star promotion.", David Crane said in an interview with Good Deal Games. "We wanted to create an environment where if a game player enjoyed the 'writing style' of a particular game designer, he or she could look for the next game by that same author and not be disappointed."

By 1982, Activision's stock soared, and it responded in a very modern way: by buying up all of the smaller companies it could find. At about the same time, Activision started to branch out into home PC development.

Strong Foothold

The theme of "developer as author" had gained a strong foothold in the American game industry, inspiring fledgling companies like Electronic Arts and Interplay, and kicking off a sort of "games as art" movement. And then came the crash. Larry Kaplan quietly resigned and returned to Atari, complaining of monitored phone calls, that nobody was interested in hardware development, and that he simply wasn't having fun anymore.

Though Activision weathered 1984, all of the recent acquisitions and ventures left its coffers lower than they might have been. Stock plummeted, and two more of the original team – Miller and Whitehead – again jumped ship, to form Accolade. "We owned stock, but the VC’s got the controlling interest." Whitehead explained to Digital Press Online. "We were insiders, so selling stock was a no-no, but the market had turned and our stock was a tenth of what it was… and morale wasn’t so good." In the late '80s and early '90s, Accolade would pick up much where Activision left off in its original mission (including its fight-the-system attitude toward console development).

Two years later, CEO Jim Levy offered to buy out the struggling text adventure developer Infocom, noting the similarity in culture and mission between the two companies. The two companies quickly came to an agreement, and Levy promised to leave Infocom more or less alone to do its own thing. Six months later, in response to further losses, Activision founder Jim Levy was kicked off the board and replaced with Bruce Davis, the one board member who had opposed the Infocom merger.

In 1989, after twelve quarters of loss, Infocom was shut down; about half its employees were offered jobs within Activision. Five agreed; the rest stayed in Massachusetts out of disgust.