Electronic Arts Almost Owned Call of Duty and Blizzard

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Electronic Arts Almost Owned Call of Duty and Blizzard

In a recent interview as part of an episode of the ‘Grit’ podcast, Bobby Kotick sat down with

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Gordon, former Chief Creative Officer at Electronic Arts. It was revealed in the earlier minutes of the episode – which spans a whopping two hours – that Electronic Arts once passed up opportunities to acquire Blizzard, Call of Duty, and Guitar Hero, among other brands.

Eventually, Activision Blizzard, which was formerly led by Bobby Kotick as CEO, was purchased in its entirety by

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, with the tech titan acquiring all aforementioned labels.

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What Might Have Been

The

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opened with Bobby Kotick suggesting that

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Gordon would have been one of the toughest CEOs in gaming to deal with as a competitor and that he and his team would have paid to keep the then-CEO in place at Electronic Arts. It was all in jest and talk turned to mergers and acquisitions, with Gordon gushing over Kotick’s notorious success in the space.

That’s not entirely true, though – Kotick explained some of the rougher patches of the M&A streak:

We actually had a bad acquisition.

The company that was in Manchester that did the driving game for Xbox… We had a good guy who was running the day-to-day but he was like a brilliant guy, who — he was in strat planning.

It was $80 million and like, we wrote it off two years later. Everything about it violated all our principles.

That guy was an expensive lesson.

I can assume Kotick is referring to Bizarre Creations, the developer behind Project Gotham Racing – but the studio was based in Liverpool, not Manchester.

Kotick then explained how Electronic Arts tried acquiring Activision and Blizzard (assumedly pre- the 2008 merger):

They tried to buy us a bunch of times, we had merger conversations a bunch of times.

Gordon then expanded:

While you were doing Blizzard, that EA passed on, and you were doing King, EA did PopCap — just stupid things.

These revelations were in the first ten minutes of the two-hour podcast episode. It’s a plethora of gaming history that sees Gordon and Kotick walk down memory lane while discussing the origin stories of some of the biggest franchises in the business.

In one segment, Kotick explained about how Overwatch was created at Blizzard. He stressed that it went against the Blizzard ‘aesthetic’ and mentioned it was ‘unbelievable’ that the team pieced it together after focusing on ‘dark’ games for so long.

Do you think Electronic Arts would have tanked the Call of Duty brand as it did with Medal of Honor and (arguably) Battlefield? Let us know on the Insider Gaming forum.

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For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out our recent feature on the ‘secret power’ company inside the COD League

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#Electronic #Arts #Owned #Call #Duty #Blizzard

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