Vivendi Games - History

History

The history of Vivendi Games begins in February 1996, when CUC International, a large mail order and subscription company, offered to acquire entertainment software developer Sierra Entertainment. Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Sierra was the leading developer and publisher of computer games and was famous for its adventure game series such as King's Quest, Gabriel Knight, Space Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. Sierra was a public company, which employed roughly 1,000 employees at 12 different acquired studios. CUC offered to absorb Sierra's stock shares at a price roughly 90% higher than what Sierra was trading, and on July 24, 1996, Sierra became a wholly owned subsidiary of CUC.

At the same time, CUC also approached Davidson & Associates, a leading publisher and distributor of educational software, with an offer of a similar stock swap. Headquartered in Torrance, California, Davidson was famous for its Math Blaster series, and also for Warcraft and Diablo. While mainly a game publisher, Davidson also had a major in-house developer in the form of Blizzard Entertainment, which Davidson had acquired in 1994, and employed over 800 employees as of February 1996. Davidson was also a public company, founded and headed by Bob Davidson, who acted as CEO, and also by Jan Davidson, who acted as President.

After acquiring these companies, CUC quickly integrated these two new divisions into the main CUC organization by announcing in September 1996 the creation of CUC Software, a holding company which would consolidate the finance, distribution, manufacturing, accounting, sales, R&D and overall management of CUC's software companies.

Soon after its creation, CUC Software acquired in January 1997 Knowledge Adventure, a leading developer of educational software, famous for its JumpStart series of child oriented programs. CUC also acquired Gryphon Software, another educational software company. Davidson & Associates and Gryphon were then absorbed into Knowledge Adventure, and Blizzard Entertainment was made a separate division of CUC Software. In 1997, CUC Software also acquired Berkeley Systems, a California-based developer famous for its You Don't Know Jack series, and integrated Berkeley Systems into Sierra On-Line.

CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant's stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, which included Sierra and Blizzard, to French publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. In June 2000, Vivendi acquired Seagram (owner of Universal Studios) to become Vivendi Universal and Universal's video game division, Universal Interactive, was renamed Vivendi Universal Games in 2002. In 2004, Vivendi Universal Games sold one of its divisions, Knowledge Adventure to a group of private investors.

When parent company Vivendi Universal dropped the "Universal" in its name in 2006 to simply become Vivendi SA, Vivendi Universal Games followed suit and became Vivendi Games. Unlike Vivendi Universal Games, Vivendi Games never published any video game under its own name.

In 2006, Vivendi Games created a new mobile division Vivendi Games Mobile, which was promised to begin publishing and distributing games in 2006 through mobile carriers and portals.

In December 2007 it was announced that Vivendi Games would merge with games publisher Activision, forming Activision Blizzard. In July 2008, the merger went active. Activision Blizzard, the new moniker for the company, now operates the games division of Vivendi SA.