Activision Publish, Inc. is a leading worldwide developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment and leisure products for various consoles, handheld platforms and the PC. Activision’s roots go back to the late 1970’s while four of their founders worked for Atari.

The programmers at Atari became disgruntled with the company for not crediting game developers or compensating them for games that sold well. Many of Atari’s programmers decided to leave the company to form their own independent software companies. Four of Atari’s top programmers David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead left Atari in late 1979 to form their own software company. On October 1st, 1979 Activision was founded by Jim Levy, Richard Muchmore and the four ex-Atari programmers.

Activision became the world’s first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming consoles. Before Activision, games for home consoles were published exclusively by the makers of the systems. Since the four programmers at Activision already had much experience with the Atari VCS their first products were cartridge games for the Atari VCS console. There first release was in July 1980 for the North American market and August 1981 for the international market. Activision titles quickly became more popular than those of Atari’s itself resulting in Atari trying to block 3rd party development for their console in court but failed.

Soon other publishers would follow in Activision’s footsteps and start developing games for the Atari VCS as well as developing for other systems. This move started to hurt Atari financially as they were the leader in the market, and they were no longer the sole supplier of software for their popular gaming system. The beginning of 3rd party game development may have hurt Atari initially but it was a positive change for other console manufactures as it would allow for more games to be released on their systems and allow for popular arcade games to be developed for their systems which were needed in order to compete with Atari’s exclusives at the time. With 3rd party development now available for multiple systems this took the burden off of the console manufacturers shoulders as they no longer had to maintain a consistent flow of new games being created in-house as the 3rd party developers would release enough games to keep their customers happy until the next 1st party game release.