Activision was founded in 1979 by four renegades from Atari; Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, David Crane and Larry Kaplan. Along with these four programmers was Jim Levy, a former music industry executive. The five of them made history by creating the world's first independent game developer and distributor.

Reason for this was that in the old days, programmers weren't credited with the games they had made. The only credits that run was the company name. Seeking reckognition for their work, they left Atari behind which caused legal actions between Atari and Activision. Between the four of them, they were responsible for more than half of Atari's cartridge sales at the time, and Atari did not want to loose them. The trial ended in 1982, with Activision winning.

A little while later Activision felt that the golden age of console gaming was over, and made the clever move to start producing games for home computers as well.

This move, along with the production of Pitfall! for the Atari in 1982, established Activision as a major force to be reckoned with. Pitfall! was a huge success that every gamer wanted, resulting in numerous clones and arcade games. To top it off, Pitfall! is considered to be the worlds very first platform game - creating an enormous gaming market for future platformers.

Then in 1985 Activison, with Jim Levy in the lead, married with the American company Infocom, who was struggling at the time. Jim Levy was a huge fan of Infocom's games and wanted to make sure that their legacy would survive for generations to come. What started out well, turned into a disaster only six months later, when Bruce Davis took over as CEO for Activision. He had been against the merging of the two companies from the beginning, and started making life hard and miserable for Infocom. Davis forced Infocom to go through unpopular marketing changes, that led to a huge loss of sales on Infocom's behalf.

Loosing money on Infocom, Activision had no choice but to close down the branch in 1989. Davis had managed to get rid of Infocom for good.

In 1988 Activision changed its name to Mediagenic, as a marketing move. They had decided to start selling software other than games, and thought the new name would help them accomplish this. However, loosing their focus on games production proved to be a fatal error, and Mediagenic filed for bankruptcy in 1992.

Clinging on to what little life the company had, they merged with The Disc Company, and changed its name back to Activision on December 1992. Seeing the error of their ways, they started to only produce games for different platforms. From now on they vowed never to touch other software again.

Just before Mediagenic had filed for bankruptcy, they had, in 1991, released a CD-ROM entitled The Lost Treasures of Infocom - featuring 20 of the best Infocom titles. This had sold so well, that the striving Activision decided to release The Lost Treasures of Infocom II to help them get back on their feet after the bankruptcy. This proved to be a huge success and Activision was once again a force to be reckoned with.

In 1997, Activison aquired the American company Raven Software, the British CentreSoft Ltd., and the German NBG Distribution. Then in 1998, they bought Head Game Publishing. Followed up by another purchase in 1999, this time the LA company Neversoft Entertainment. With more money burning in their pockets, they also purchased Shaba Games LLC in 2002 and Z-Axis Ltd., - the award-winning creative studio behind the million-unit selling franchise Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX. And finished it off by buying software developer Luxoflux Corporation the same year. Then in 2005, Activision bought up Toys for Bob and the Canadian Beenox, Inc.

In 2008 Activision was acquired by Vivendi, the owner of Blizzard and became Activision Blizzard.