What do you do when the company you make video games for does not want to recognise nor pay you royalties for your efforts? You become disgruntled and leave that company with a few of your programmer co-workers and form your own company. Well, that is pretty much how Activision was created – to break the shackles from Atari and recognise the programming geniuses behind some of the most beloved video games of all time.
In creating Activision; David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead became the world’s first third-party video games developers. So thank you to the courage of these men, we can only speculate (Ed: shudder to think!) what would have happened if we didn’t have a third-party video games developer community.
Activision has changed over the last three and a half decades, as has the video games market, but its legacy will not be forgotten. We still love playing their creations from all those years ago, from Pitfall! and River Raid on the Atari 2600, to breaking joysticks with Decathlon on the C64. Ah, those were the days. Happy 35th birthday Activision!
