Jim Levy

Jim Levy was a former music industry executive who understood the critical importance of talent recognition and royalties in creative industries. When he met the frustrated Atari programmers, his background in the recording industry allowed him to apply the 'rock star' model to video game development, serving as Activision's first CEO and pioneering the concept of giving software engineers public credit on game packaging.

Activision Blizzard is the result of a 2008 merger, but its foundational roots lie in the original formation of Activision, a company created out of sheer creative rebellion. In 1979, the video game industry was dominated by Atari and its console, the Atari 2600. At the time, Atari treated its game developers like anonymous assembly-line workers; they were paid meager salaries, denied royalties, and explicitly forbidden from putting their names on the games they programmed, even if those games generated millions of dollars in profit. Furious with this anonymity and lack of financial participation, four of Atari's top programmers, David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller, and Bob Whitehead, resigned in protest. They met with a former music industry executive named Jim Levy, who recognized that video game designers should be treated like rock stars, not factory workers. Together, they founded Activision (combining the words 'active' and 'television'), becoming the first independent, third-party video game developer in history. They pioneered the radical concept of giving developers public credit on the box art and paying them royalties based on sales. This rapid move enraged Atari, who tried unsuccessfully to sue them out of existence, but Activision thrived, eventually producing early hits like 'Pitfall!' The other half of the modern entity, Blizzard Entertainment, was founded over a decade later in 1991 by three UCLA graduates: Michael Morhaime, Allen Adham, and Frank Pearce. Originally called Silicon & Synapse, the trio maxed out their personal credit cards to fund a small studio focused on creating polished PC games. They eventually rebranded as Blizzard Entertainment in 1994, just before releasing 'Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.' Driven by Morhaime's obsessive commitment to extreme quality and polish, famously delaying games for years with the mantra 'it will be released when it's ready', Blizzard became the most revered PC developer on Earth, creating industry-defining franchises like Diablo, StarCraft, and the cultural phenomenon World of Warcraft. The 2008 merger masterminded by then-CEO Bobby Kotick brought these two distinct cultures under one large corporate roof.