The Kotick Years

As CEO, Kotick took, and takes, pride in how detached he is from the game industry, seeing his disinterest in the material of the industry as a strength from a business standpoint. As Kotick told US News and World Report, "I don't play video games. I'm not a techie. I'm the capitalist, the guy who knows how to take all the fun out of game playing." To Kotick's credit, he has indeed brought a sort of focus and determination to a company that had been struggling under some of the least effective management in the industry, transforming Activision from a struggling relic into the second biggest independent game publisher in the US, after EA. For that matter, Kotick has done pretty well by himself; in 2002, Fortune named him as one of the "40 richest under 40", estimating his worth at $120.8 million.

At the same time, under Kotick, Activision has found itself in some precarious situations. Most recently, as reported on this site, the company has come under the scrutiny of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Allegedly (and in very simple terms) bosses cashed in stock options, worth a few hundred million dollars, after Kotick and other "top executives" back-dated their stock option grants to before a recent plunge, so as to increase their value.

Likewise, in the wake of the "EA_Spouse" issue, complaints have arisen about working conditions in Activision's subsidiary studios. Claims of 90-hour weeks for years on end and unpaid overtime have made the rounds. This past May, Activision was struck with a class action suit claiming unpaid wages and punitive damages. Again as reported here, EA recently settled its suit with Erin Hoffman (disclaimer: I've known her personally for years), suggesting some precedent. Overall, amongst all the suits and investigations and allegations, these days it can seem – especially to the casual observer – like Activision is hardly ever out of hot water.

No Monster

Today's Activision is hardly a monster, of course. In a warm light you could view it as a holding company for some of the best, most well-loved talent in North America. Still, there's a big breach between the focused, idealistic team of the early '80s and the corporation of today – namely in that today's Activision doesn't really stand for anything in particular, and neither does it really produce anything. Its principals lie simply in profit, and it leaves both production and personality to its scattered acquisitions, on which it relies for that profit. That it has such good taste in acquisitions is, I suppose, at least some consolation. Its lack of vision, however, leads to some curious situations. See Kotick's recent New York Times interview where he muses that "full downloadable games [are] so far in the future that it's almost incomprehensible.", despite the success of Steam and Xbox Live, the experiments of companies like Telltale Games, and Nintendo's pending Virtual Console.

Still, whatever Activision does tomorrow, and however irrelevant it might be today, its legacy was etched in alabaster over two and a half decades ago. Activision will always be the first third-party company, it will always have started the movement for individual recognition, it will always have been on the forefront of the argument for games as human expression. That it never got to complete its mission, and that it's taken twenty years for us to find our way back, is beside the point. In the end, its founding principles will outlive even the company itself.