Expert Software
 |
|
Santa Monica headquarters
|
|
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry |
Computer and video games Interactive entertainment |
| Founded | October 1, 1979 |
| Founders |
David Crane Alan Miller Bob Whitehead Larry Kaplan |
| Headquarters | Santa Monica, California, United States |
|
Number of locations
|
38 (studios and offices) |
|
Area served
|
Worldwide |
|
Key people
|
Eric Hirshberg (CEO) |
| Products | List of Activision video games |
| Revenue |
 $2.2 billion (2016) |
|
Number of employees
|
4000 |
| Parent | Activision Blizzard |
| Subsidiaries | |
| Website | activision |
|
Footnotes / references |
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Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher. It was founded on October 1, 1979 and was the world's first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles. Its first products were cartridges for the Atari 2600 video console system published from July 1980 for the US market and from August 1981 for the international market (UK).
As of January 2017, Activision is one of the largest video game publishers in the world and was also the top publisher for 2016 in the United States.
Its CEO is Eric Hirshberg. Its parent company is Activision Blizzard, formed from the merger of Activision and Vivendi Games on July 9, 2008, an entity which became a completely independent company on July 25, 2013 when Activision Blizzard purchased the remaining shares from then majority owner Vivendi.
Before Activision, third-party developers did not exist. Software for video game consoles were published exclusively by makers of the systems for which the games were designed. For example, Atari was the only publisher of games for the Atari 2600. This was particularly galling to the developers, as they received neither financial rewards nor credit for games that sold well.
Atari programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead met with Atari CEO Ray Kassar in May 1979 to demand that the company treat developers as record labels treated musicians, with royalties and their names on game boxes. Kaplan, who called the others "the best designers for the [2600] in the world", recalled that Kassar called the four men "towel designers" and that "anyone can do a cartridge." Crane, Miller, and Whitehead left Atari and founded Activision in October 1979 with former music industry executive Jim Levy and venture capitalist Richard Muchmore; Kaplan joined soon. David Crane has said the name "Activision" was based on Jim Levy's idea to combine 'active' and 'television'. The original name proposed for the company was VSync, Inc.
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Wikipedia