Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.

Hey there and welcome to Tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an

executive producer with I-Heart Podcasts and how the Tech are you? So as

2023 winds down we're looking back on some of the big tech stories that happened this year.

I've mentioned this one a few times, but I figured it would be better to do a full look back on Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which actually obviously stretches

back more than a year. It was never a guaranteed deal, and there was a significant amount of

opposition to it all around the world.

So today we're going to look at how the story began and how it unfolded as well as we'll

speculate a little bit about the future now that the two companies have put ink to paper. Now let's start off with

background on Activision Blizzard. The company traces its history to the earliest days of home video game

markets.

Activision launched out of Atari

when a group of folks decided

that it might be nice to receive credit

and royalties for their work,

rather than all that sweet cash and credit going to the company itself.

So Activision made some real bangers like Pitfall, which if you're old like I am, you might remember fondly.

Compared to more recent games, of course, it's primitive.

But trust me, at the time, Pitfall was amazing. Skip ahead to 1991 and a guy named Bobby Kodak

would, along with some financial partners,

by a significant amount of stock in Activision.

He would later become the CEO of the company. That same year, the company that would become Blizzard would form.

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