The four made the decision to soon leave Atari and start their own business, but were not sure how to go about it. Kaplan, who called the others "the best designers for the in the world", recalled that Kassar called the four men "towel designers" and claimed that "anybody can do a cartridge". The group met with Kassar in May 1979 to demand that the company treat developers as record labels treated musicians, with royalties and their names on game boxes. Ĭrane, Kaplan, Miller, and Whitehead became vocal about the lack of recognition within the company and became known as the "Gang of Four". Out of a development staff of thirty-five, four programmers (Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead), had produced games that had accounted for 60% of Atari's sales. Crane noted that the games he was fully responsible for had brought in over $20 million for the company but he was still only receiving a $20,000 salary. In early 1979, Atari's marketing department circulated a memo listing the best-selling cartridges from the previous year to help guide game ideas. Atari's CEO Ray Kassar, named to that position following Warner's acquisition in 1978, was committed to keeping production costs minimal for Warner, according to David Crane, one of Atari's programmers. According to developer John Dunn, Warner management treated developers as engineers rather than creative staff, creating conflicts with staff. Warner Communication's management style was also different from Bushnell's. Prior to Warner's acquisition, the company did not award bonus pay to programmers who worked on profitable games, nor credit the programmers publicly, to prevent them from being recruited by rival game companies. That same year, Atari began hiring programmers to create games for the system.
from Nolan Bushnell to help accelerate the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS or later the Atari 2600) to market by 1977. In 1976, Warner Communications bought Atari, Inc. Within this structure, Activision serves to manage numerous third-party studios and publish all the parent company's games outside those created by Blizzard. In 2008, this holding company merged with Vivendi Games (the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment) and formed Activision Blizzard, with Kotick as its CEO. A holding company was formed as Activision's parent company to manage the internal and acquired studios. Building on existing assets, the Kotick-led Activision pursued more publishing opportunities and, after recovering from the former debt, started acquiring numerous studios and intellectual properties over the 1990s and 2000s, among these being the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero series.
Kotick instituted a full rework of the company to cover its debts: dismissing most of its staff, moving the company to Los Angeles, and reverting to the Activision name.
Mediagenic quickly fell into debt, and the company was bought for around US$500,000 by Bobby Kotick and a small group of investors around 1991.
After a management shift, with CEO Jim Levy replaced by Bruce Davis, the company renamed itself as Mediagenic and branched out into business software applications. The 1983 video game crash, in part created by too many new companies trying to follow in Activision's footsteps without the expertise of Activision's founders, hurt Activision's position in console games, forcing them to diversify into games for home computers, including the acquisition of Infocom. Activision was the first independent, third-party, console video game developer. on Octoin Sunnyvale, California, by former Atari game developers, upset at how they were treated at Atari, to develop their own games for the popular Atari 2600 home video game console. The company was founded as Activision, Inc. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world and was the top United States publisher in 2016. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California.