Activision Blizzard, Inc.

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Screen from World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG).

© 2006 Blizzard Entertainment, all rights reserved

Activision Blizzard is an American developer and manufacturer of electronic games. The company was formed in 2008 by the merger of Activision, an entertainment software publisher that traced its roots to the original Atari game console, and Vivendi Games, the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment, a PC software publisher best known for the Diablo, Warcraft, and StarCraft franchises and for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft. At the conclusion of the merger, in which Activision was the senior partner, Vivendi purchased 52 percent of the stock in the newly formed Activision Blizzard. Both Activision and Blizzard maintained distinct corporate identities, with independent development and publishing streams. In January 2022 Microsoft announced its intention to acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion; that deal was concluded in October 2023. The company’s corporate headquarters are located in Santa Monica, California.

Activision was founded in 1979 by David Crane and Alan Miller—game designers who split with Atari over issues of creator’s rights—and entertainment executive Jim Levy. Their response was to create a company where designers would be an essential part of the brand identity, with the lead developer of a given title receiving credit on the game box. Soon after the company’s formation, they were joined by fellow Atari designers Larry Kaplan and Bob Whitehead. As the electronic gaming industry’s first third-party software developer, Activision immediately faced a legal challenge from Atari, which attempted to preserve its monopoly on games for the Atari VCS system. That suit was settled in 1982, but by that time Activision had already established itself as a thriving competitor in an expanding industry. Games such as Chopper Command and River Raid sported vibrant graphics and fluid gameplay, and Pitfall! represented one of the earliest examples of the platform game genre.

The success of Activision inspired a wave of imitators, and soon the market was flooded with games of dubious quality. Between 1983 and 1984 the industry collapsed under the weight of its own overexpansion. Activision weathered the storm by shifting its focus to the burgeoning home computer market, but the ill-timed acquisition of text-based adventure game publisher Infocom almost doomed the company. A corporate reorganization led to the departure of much of the company’s creative talent, including the last of its founders, and in 1988 the Activision name was abandoned in favour of Mediagenic, as executives attempted to rebrand the company as a multipurpose software developer. Mediagenic struggled to stay afloat, but a change in ownership and management in 1990 signaled a dramatic turnaround. The company renamed itself Activision in 1992, and it spent the next few years building on the successes of its past, releasing titles such as Return to Zork (1993), a graphic adventure based on a classic Infocom game, and Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (1994), an addictive platform game.

Activision acquired a new generation of talented designers, and it won critical acclaim with PC offerings like Interstate ’76 (1997), a stylish, funk-infused, 3D vehicle combat game that anticipated such later titles as Grand Theft Auto from Rockstar Games. The company also forged lucrative partnerships with independent developers. Although development costs for new games soared—a typical game cost millions of dollars to bring to market—Activision continued to post profits through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Activision and developer Infinity Ward launched the Call of Duty franchise in 2003, and the game immediately challenged Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor series for supremacy of the first-person shooter market. Activision joined developers RedOctane and Harmonix Music Systems for the sequels to Guitar Hero (2005), a rhythm-based game that became a popular culture phemonenon. While future development of Guitar Hero titles was halted in 2011, other Activision properties remained strong. Call of Duty consistently ranked as one of the most lucrative franchises in electronic gaming, Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon remained popular platform titles, and a remastered Tony Hawk Pro Skater added new life to the venerable skateboarding series.

Blizzard Entertainment was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Allen Adham, Michael Morhaime, and Frank Pearce, three UCLA graduates with an interest in electronic gaming. The company’s early projects were conversions of existing titles for a variety of home computer systems, but it soon released a number of original titles, including The Lost Vikings (1992), a clever platform game, and Rock ’N’ Roll Racing (1993), a vehicle combat game. The company changed its name to Blizzard Entertainment in 1994, shortly before it released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, a real-time strategy game (RTS) that became one of the definitive works in that genre. Blizzard followed with Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness (1995), a graphically rich expansion on the original that offered a number of interface and multiplayer improvements.

Multiplayer would figure heavily in Blizzard’s future success. The action role-playing game Diablo (1996) launched with Battle.net, a free service that allowed players to join multiplayer games and chat online. Battlenet’s player base expanded dramatically with the release of StarCraft (1998), an RTS game loosely based on the Warcraft model. Although StarCraft featured an engaging single-player campaign, its true strength was in its well-balanced multiplayer mode.

The best-selling Diablo II (2000) refined the multiplayer elements that had made the first Diablo a success. Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos (2002) incorporated limited role-playing elements into the standard RTS formula, and it allowed end users to create new game maps, import new sound effects, and radically alter the gameplay experience.

The next entry in the Warcraft franchise deviated dramatically from the RTS roots of its predecessors, but it provided Blizzard with its biggest hit to date. World of Warcraft (WoW), a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, debuted in 2004, and it drew millions of players to the shared, persistent online world of Azeroth. The game built on the mythology of the earlier Warcraft titles, with orcs, dwarves, elves, and other fantasy tropes featuring prominently, but the social networking aspects of the game were perhaps its greatest strengths. In October 2010, almost six years after WoW’s release, the game boasted more than 12 million monthly subscribers.

After numerous delays, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty reached stores in July 2010, accompanied by an upgraded version of Battle.net. The matchmaking platform was redesigned to more closely resemble online content distributors such as Valve Corporation’s Steam client or Apple’s iTunes service, as well as to provide a smoother transition between the single-player and multiplayer experience. Diablo III sold more than 3.5 million copies on its first day of release in 2012, setting a new record for fastest-selling PC game. While sequels to Blizzard’s various franchises remained in development limbo, in 2016 the company made its first foray into the first-person shooter market with Overwatch, a wildly successful team-based multiplayer game.

In 2016 Activision Blizzard purchased the mobile game company King Digital Entertainment for $5.9 billion. King, the developer of the popular Candy Crush puzzle game series, boasted a global user base of 500 million people, and the acquisition demonstrated Activision Blizzard’s interest in the booming mobile game market. Profits remained solid, and World of Warcraft continued its reign as the world’s most popular MMORPG, but revenues and business dealings were soon eclipsed by tales of a toxic work environment at the company’s headquarters. A two-year investigation by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) concluded in July 2021 and found that female employees, who made up about one-fifth of the Activision Blizzard workforce, were subjected to a “frat boy workplace culture.” A suit brought by the DFEH alleged that binge drinking and sexual harassment were commonplace at Activision Blizzard and that female employees were denied promotions and unfairly compensated for their work when compared with male colleagues. While the company disputed the DFEH’s claims, it promptly settled a similar suit from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for $18 million.

The ongoing scandal led to the departure of the president of the Blizzard subsidiary and demands for the resignation of longtime CEO Bobby Kotick. Kotick had purchased a sizable stake in Activision (then Mediagenic) in 1990, when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy, and was named CEO the following year. Kotick guided the company from near collapse to its merger with Blizzard, when he was named CEO of Activision Blizzard. In November 2021 a report in The Wall Street Journal revealed that Kotick had been aware of the harassment and abuse of female employees for years and had attempted to minimize the severity of the issue to the company’s board of directors. Activision Blizzard employees staged a mass walkout in the wake of the article, and the company’s stock plunged.

It was at this time that Microsoft, a longtime partner of Activision through the former’s Xbox division, reached out to Kotick and the company’s board to begin discussions about a possible takeover bid. The results of those talks were made public in January 2022, when Microsoft announced that it would acquire Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. Antitrust regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU raised objections to the deal, which promised to be among the most valuable technology sector acquisitions in history. To satisfy U.S. authorities, Microsoft pledged to make Call of Duty titles available on rival platforms, such as Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Switch, for a period of 10 years. To earn U.K. approval, Microsoft committed to selling the streaming rights for Activision’s current and future catalog to the French software company Ubisoft for 15 years. The sale finally concluded on October 13, 2023; that same day Kotick announced his resignation, effective at the end of the year.