Activision Publishing, Inc. is an American video game publisher based in Santa Monica, California. It serves as the publishing business for its parent company, Activision Blizzard, and consists of several subsidiary studios. Activision is one of the largest third-party video game publishers in the world. The company was founded as Activision, Inc. in 1979 by former Atari game developers.
In 1988, the company renamed itself to Mediagenic and branched out into business software applications. After recovering from its former financial troubles in early 1990s, the company reverted itself to Activision name and started acquiring numerous studios and various types of intellectual property over, among these being the Call of Duty and Guitar Hero video game series. In 2008, they merged with Vivendi Games, the parent company of Blizzard Entertainment, and formed Activision Blizzard.
