Speaking at the Dice Summit 2010 in Vegas, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick offered a compelling history of the company's origins and detailed some of its biggest misses through the years.
"All my life I was the rebel flying the Millennium Falcon and suddenly I wake up and I'm on board the Death Star," joked Kotick, whose inspired keynote took audience members back to his early days when he attempted to acquire Mediagenic, "... which was the name given to Activision after they no longer wanted to be a game company."
"So here I was in 1990 and I was wondering who the fu** would call a company Mediagenic when you have the name Activision?" he said.
Kotick had just spent all of his money -- some $440,000 -- to buy a chunk of the company. He sat in an office on a $28,000 couch as the then-head of Mediagenic grilled him about his plans to take over. He asked why Kotick wanted the firm so badly. Activision's CEO recounted his love for all of the old Activision classics -- so many great brands, including the likes of Pitfall.
"To be honest, I don't want to own Mediagenic. I don't want to contract Mediagenic. It might be contagious. I want to own Activision," he said.
Kotick spoke about his love about the concept powering Activision's creation -- the well-publicized story of Atari developers who felt unappreciated by the company and decided to create their own publishing house to express their creative ideas.
"The idea that we could restore Activision to its glory... that was really appealing to me," said Kotick.
We all know the end of the story. Activision today is one of the biggest and most successful publishers in the world and owns the rights to some of the most popular gaming franchises, including 2009's blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.
But Kotick said that his high-level management style has proven costly on occasion. For instance, when Activision had the chance to buy Maxis, the developer of SimCity 2000. He visited their offices and spent an entire day looking at SimCity 2000, which was said to be buggy and unpolished. He thought the only reason to buy the company would be for the game and the franchise so he didn't even bother to look at another title codenamed Jefferson in one of the back offices. It was being worked on by Will Wright and it turned into The Sims.
Kotick also expressed regret about the handling of the lucrative Guitar Hero franchise. He said it was a good piece of software and he figured that if they gave the series to NeverSoft it could knock it out of the park. In hindsight, though, he believes that Harmonix is a very talented group and that they could have probably done some wonderful things with the brand.
Then, of course, there was a little company called Blizzard.
"I remember in the mid-1990s and I was having dinner with Bob Davidson and he was telling me he just bought Blizzard for $7 million. I was thinking it was mind-boggling that he could've spent that much." Kotick said he liked Rock & Roll Racing and knew about WarCraft. A decade later, Activision looked at Blizzard -- and the price tag had ballooned to $700 million. He thought it was too expensive at the time.
"So of course we merged when they were worth 7 billion dollars," he joked.
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