Co-founder & CEO · Activision · 1979–1987
A record-industry executive who took the music business's idea of the credited, royalty-earning artist and applied it to video games — inventing third-party publishing along the way.
Activision was founded on 1 October 1979 by four Atari programmers — David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead — who had left because Atari would neither credit them on the games they wrote nor pay them a share of what those games earned. A grievance is not a company, and what turned one into the other was Jim Levy, who became Activision's founding president and chief executive. He came out of the music industry, where the proposition that the person who made the record gets their name on the sleeve and a percentage of the receipts was not a radical demand but simply how the business ran. Applied to software, it was radical. Activision became the first company to develop and publish games for a console it did not manufacture, and Levy built the whole presentation around the designers: names on the packaging, manuals written in the designer's own voice, embroidered patches mailed to players who photographed a high score. Atari sued, arguing that only it could publish for its own hardware. The case settled in 1982 with Activision paying royalties — and in settling, the entire third-party publishing model that the industry now runs on was legitimised. The launch titles for the Atari 2600 in July 1980 were Dragster by Crane, Boxing by Whitehead, Fishing Derby by Miller and Checkers by Kaplan, and the company grew at a rate that made it one of the more remarkable business stories of the era before the 1983 crash cut the ground from under every publisher at once. Levy led Activision's acquisition of the text-adventure house Infocom in 1986 and left the company the following year.