Activision Loses Its Identity

It's funny how gaming has changed so Popular Video Games just in the last few years alone. It's no longer Sega Dreamcast Adapters and Cables niche market, or an "obscure" hobby. Video games have come out of the darkened arcades and primarily male-driven audiences, to embrace every kind of demographic Xbox Game Controllers and many titles have budgets that rival the biggest of the Hollywood movies.

There's not much left of the "Atari Age" of yesteryear. Atari survives, but is more of a logo these days as it just replaced the InfoGrames label. Activision, Atari's first third-party company, has been one of the few publishers to survive the "Great Video Game Crash of 1983", and has evolved to meet the changing and maturing industry.

Activision was led by a team of talented programmers (David Crane, Alan White, Steve Cartwright, Robert Whitehead, Larry Kaplan, and others) that played things differently. The programmers allowed consumers to see who created their favorite games, placing the art alongside the artist. There were a slew of titles that the company came to be associated with for console and computer: Pitfall!, Kaboom!, Freeway, Robot Tank, and one of their first licensed properties for the computer age, Ghostbusters.

Although the "Crash" happened, nearly wiping gaming completely out of the collective minds of the average consumer, Activision survived with a stable of PC titles, and a gradual return to console gaming. The company again became known for it's titles such as the Tony Hawk series and Spider-Man. Even more recently, Activision has acquired the Guitar Hero franchise, continuing to become bigger and bigger, until recently acquiring the immensely popular adventure/RPG publisher Blizzard.

That seems to be more and more the trend these days. Publishers continue to eat up smaller companies, forming a mass collective similar to the Borg from Star Trek. EA has been doing this for years. But there's a genuine downside to these assimilations....

The companies that are swallowed up lose their identities.

Included with Blizzard are the companies Vivendi and Sierra. There were several titles planned to be released under the Sierra brand that have been now left "homeless" due to this acquisition: Brutal Legend, and Sierra.

It's surprising that Activision doesn't want anything to do with Ghostbusters. After all, they published a number of titles based on the series all through the 1980's into the early 1990's. The Ghostbusters game itself wasn't some flash in the pan title, either. It was written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, who created the series, and is backed by the voice talents of Akroyd, Ramis, Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, as well as several other notable cast members from the movies. Again, Hollywood has come to the video game arena, where digital likenesses can keep actors young and fresh and busting ghosts for quite some time.

As an added insult to injury to the movie and game's fanbase, Activison opted to keep titles such as Spyro and Crash Bandicoot, which neither has maintained the relevancy of a Mario or Sonic title, and the film series Ice Age, whose apparent popularity is beyond this writer's grasp. Ghostbusters video gaming is fairly synonymous with the Activision brand, and their total rejection to Sega Dreamcast Memory the title is similar to Capcom not having interest in releasing a new Street Fighter title, or Konami not wanting to publish another Metal Gear.

It's a genuine shame to see Activision lack any sense of interest in a franchise that has been prominently connected to them in their past history. While gaming is a business and the bottom line for companies is ultimately the financial bottom line, there's also a necessity to recognize and respond to basic "fan service", especially with a title that has generated a lot of positive press over the last year.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game will eventually be published, as the fading Sierra maintains that the title is coming out, and there are certainly multiple publishers out there who recognize the sales this title will produce. Wherever the title goes, the fan's money will follow. Money that Activision could have tucked into their wallets.

Activision was once a company name known for shaking up the industry, and letting their titles speak for themselves by recognizing the fans and the people who created the games. Now the company resembles the classic science fiction movie "The Blob", absorbing anything in its path and growing to a monstrous size without regard for anything else.

This "Blob" known as Activision is just a name now. There's not much personality in there anymore, and the message is simply money, not the consumer base that built it to what is.

Guy Chapman is the founder of Creative Business Writings, a freelance Super Nintenco Accesories site with a love for gaming. For more info contact: Guy Chapman at 702.664.0565 or at http://creativebusinesswritings.com

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