Activision

With the born of the industry of gaming some companies started to gain more popularity than others, meanwhile some others began to differentiate for their characteristic. This is the case of one of the most popular video game publisher company of the 21th century, the so called Activision.

Behind Activision: how did it grow up?

During the 80s, third-party developers (are so called companies that develop only the game and not the system) did not exist: the developers of the game were also the creators of the game's system. One of the most famous example was the Atari company, who only developed games for the Atari 2600. This fact was very annoying for most of the game designers because they did not receive any credit for their works and also no financial rewards for the number of games sold. For this reason one day, Atari programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead decided to give a cut to this boring story and met Atari's CEO, Ray Kassar. The aim of the 4 programmers was clear: they wanted to get royalties and their names on game boxes. Unfoutunatly Kassar did not approve their request. This was the turning point: Crane, Miller, and Whitehead toghether left Atari and founded Activision in October 1979, including in their ambitius project the music industry executive Jim Levy and later also Kaplan.

What are the features of this new company?

First of all, they had respect for the creators of the games: the company in fact promoted their own game designers and gave them the full credits for their own creations. Moreover, one interesting news is the possibility for the players to send a photo with their best score in order to get back an embroidered patch (a piece of art, which is created by using a fabric backing thread and some form of a needle). It was for this as little as big changing that Activision company started to collect several important programmers.

What happened after the first years?

After having had some legal complains with Atari, Activision started developing their own titles. One of the most important is for sure Pitfall!, a video game for Atari 2006, whose seals were second only to Pac Man's. Later on, they purchased the Infocom industry pioneer of text adventure, but that was not a good idea because in 1989, after several years of losses, Activision closed down the Infocom studios in Cambridge, Massachusetts and most of the programmers did not have the possibility to work for Activision anymore. Finally, during the 1988 started getting involved in the development of others software: as a result, Activision changed its corporate name to Mediagenic to have a name that globally represented all its activities even if they still producing videogames for others company.

Why did they choose the name Activision?

The name of the company does not have a particular meaning, indeed the only purpose of the founders was to make sure that the name of the new company appeared in the phone book before the one of Atari company.