ActiVision

Before the formation of Activision, video games were published exclusively by the manufacturers of the systems for which they were designed. For example, Atari was the sole distributor of games for the Atari 2600.

This was especially mortifying for game developers, as they received no financial compensation for games that did not sell well, and were not even accredited in the manuals. After seeing how several games became best sellers, a group of programmers decided that it was enough and they left. Activision was the first independent distributor for the Atari 2600. The company was founded by music industry executive Jim Levy and former Atari programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead. Levy adopted the strategy of promoting the creators of games along with the games themselves. Then, at the beginning of 1980, Activision published its first four games: Checkers, Skiing, Dragster and Boxing. The march of the four programmers, whose titles accounted for more than half of the sales of Atari cartridges at that time, was the start of legal actions between the two companies that did not finish to settle until 1982. When the market of video game consoles began to decline, Activision diversified, producing games for personal computers and acquiring smaller companies. In 1982, Activision released Pitfall !, which is considered by many to be the first platform videogame as well as the best-selling title for the Atari 2600. Although the team's technical prowess had already been demonstrated, it was Pitfall! what made them a huge success. This provoked not only a legion of copies, including arcade versions, but it can also be said to have initiated the entire platform genre, which became a major part of video games during the 1980s. Headquarters in Santa Monica, California. In 1985, Activision merged with the pioneer of the conversational adventures Infocom, which at that time had problems. Jim Levy was a big fan of Infocom games and he wanted the company to move forward. However, about six months later Bruce Davis took over as CEO of Activision. Davis was against the merger from the beginning and managed Infocom with a strong hand. He also forced marketing changes, which caused the sales of his games to sink. Finally, in 1989, after several years of losses, Activision closed the Infocom studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making only 11 of the 26 employees a transfer offer to the Activision headquarters in Silicon Valley, which five accepted. In 1988 Activision began to engage in other types of software other than video games, such as office applications. As a result, he changed his corporate name to Mediagenic to have a name that would globally represent all his fields of activity. Apart from this change, Mediagenic continued making an enormous use of the Activision brand in its videogames for the various platforms for which it edited them, notably NES, Sega Master System, Atari 7800, Commodore 64 and Amiga. The decision of the company to venture into various fields at the expense of video games turned out to be such a bad move that in 1992 Mediagenic filed for bankruptcy. The first Activision had "died".