In 1979, four Atari programmers responsible for roughly 60 percent of the company's cartridge sales asked for royalties and credit, and were told they were no more important than towel designers. That insult led David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead to found Activision with venture capitalist Jim Levy, inventing the third-party game developer in the process. This corporate biography traces the company from that spiteful garage startup through near death, a hostile takeover for $500,000, and an $18.9 billion merger with Blizzard, all the way to its 2023 acquisition by Microsoft.

We examine how Activision's lawsuit settlement with Atari legitimized software as a product separate from hardware, how the company's own success helped trigger the 1983 crash, and the disastrous Mediagenic rebrand into business software. Then we  ...