Activision

Activision was born in 1979 out of rebellion. Four of Atari's most gifted VCS programmers — David Crane, Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, and Larry Kaplan — were furious that the company treated them as anonymous assembly-line workers, refusing to credit them or share royalties even as their cartridges generated fortunes. With music-industry executive Jim Levy, they broke away to form the first independent developer of console games, an idea Atari insisted was impossible and promptly sued to stop.

Activision won that landmark legal fight, and in doing so created the third-party publishing model that underpins the entire modern industry. Its cartridges were gorgeous by Atari 2600 standards and unmistakably authored: David Crane's Pitfall! became a cultural phenomenon and one of the best-selling games of its generation, while Kaboom!, River Raid, and Chopper Command showed off a level of craft that put the platform holder to shame.

The 1983 video-game crash nearly killed the company, and a diversification into business software and a costly identity crisis (a brief renaming to Mediagenic) pushed it to the brink of collapse. Bobby Kotick led an investor group that bought the wreckage in 1991, gutted its debts, and rebuilt it around aggressive acquisition and franchise cultivation. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, the Guitar Hero explosion, and above all Call of Duty turned Activision into one of the most profitable entertainment brands in the world.

Along the way it also became a custodian of history, acquiring the ruins of Infocom in the 1980s and later reviving the Sierra name. In 2008 it merged with Blizzard Entertainment to form Activision Blizzard, marrying Call of Duty to World of Warcraft under one roof, and in 2023 the combined company was absorbed by Microsoft in the largest acquisition in gaming history.

From four disgruntled coders demanding credit to a pillar of a trillion-dollar tech empire, Activision's arc is the story of the commercial game industry itself — and every developer credit that scrolls after a game is, in a sense, its legacy.