Although Activision Blizzard is now owned by Microsoft’s gaming division, its rise to become one of the top video game publishers was inadvertently helped by EA’s decision to turn down opportunities that could have been transformative. During a recent podcast appearance, former EA Chief Creative Officer Bing Gordon noted that EA had a chance to buy Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, and even Blizzard itself before Activision closed deals for all three.
“Call of Duty, Guitar Hero, and Blizzard, EA saw all those first and passed on all of them,” said Gordon while appearing on Grit alongside Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard. Gordon went on to praise Kotick for keeping many of the original Blizzard team members in place after the company came under Activision’s control.
Gordon told Kotick that he has “double high respect” for him for realizing that those properties were valuable to own “and then you kept the people around. I’m pretty sure that… the creative leaders would not have stuck around in another company. So you did some kind of a miracle of keeping them productive for long periods of time and probably biting your tongue from time to time.”
In the same interview, Kotick noted that Blizzard already had a deal in place for the Warcraft movie when Activision took over the company. And he went on to call it one of the worst movies he’s ever seen while recounting why it was a mistake for the company to focus on that over making games.
Call of Duty is still going strong after EA passed on the deal, and it’s been the best-selling franchise for the last 25 years. However, Guitar Hero has been dormant since the release of Guitar Hero Live nearly a decade ago. Earlier this year, Hyperkin released a new Guitar Hero controller for Wii. But there don’t appear to be any plans to resurrect the franchise anytime soon.