Activision vs Tale of Tales

Activision is an American video game developer and publisher, it is owned in majority by the French conglomerate Vivendi SA. The current CEO and president is Bobby Kotick. Activision was founded on the 1^st October 1979 and was the world’s first independent developer and distributer of video games for gaming consoles. Its first products were cartridges for the Atari 2600 video console system published from July 1980.

Activision is now one of the largest third party video games publishers in the world and it was the top publisher in 2007 in the United States.

On the 2^nd December 2007, it was announced that Activision would be acquired by Vivendi, with Vivendi contributing its gaming division plus cash, in exchange for a majority stake in the new company. The merger between Activision and Vivendi games took place on the 9^th July 2008, with the newly formed Activision Blizzard. Activision still exists as a subsidiary owned by Activision Blizzard, and it will still develop games such as Call of Duty and Guitar Hero.

Activision develops high stake games and very popular brand named games such as; Call of Duty, Spyro, Prototype, Tony Hawk, Wolfenstien, Guitar Hero, Star Wars Jedi Knight Academy etc. They are also well known for creating movie games when a popular movie comes out such as; Spiderman, GoldenEye, Transformers, Kun Fu Panda, Madagascar, Shriek etc. In my opinion these games are just pointless as most of them of rushed for the release date for the movie, they also feel very pointless as they have been made with a sense of profit making as the gameplay is rushed and graphics are usually poor.

Tale of Tales BVBA is a Belgian developer of art games and screensavers founded in 2002 by Auriea Harvey (Concept art, 3D modelling and texture mapping) and Michaël Samyn (Interaction, effects and games programming) who had been working together in the creation of web sites and electronic art since 1991. They live very close to the Saint Bravo Cathedral, which they consider to be their greatest influence. The studio is named after Giambattista Basile’s book The Tale of Tales (Lo Cunto de li cuntil) with their main series being retellings of fairy tales in the form of adventure games, each subtitled “a tale of tales” and linked together by a common character referred to as the Deaf-mute Girl in the pretty white dress.

February 2010 saw the release of Vanitas, described as “a memento mori for your digital hands” their first work for the iPhone OS platform and their first music by Zoë Keating.

The purpose of Tale of Tales is to create elegent and emotional but with rich interactive entertainment. They explicitly want to cater to people who are not enchanted by most contemporary computer games and who wouldn’t mind more variety in their gameplay experiences. All of their products feature innovative forms of interaction, engaging poetic narratives and simple controls.

Tale of Tales started life with the design of 8, an epic single player PC exploration game inspired by the various versions of the folk tale, Sleeping Beauty. The 8 project is being re-visited in 2010 and developed under the name The Book of 8, which is in the early prototype stage.

The Endless Forest is our second big project: an online multiplayer game. The Endless Forest was launched in September 2005 and continues to evolve.

The Path is our first commercially available single player game, released in March 2009. A spiritual sequel to 8, The Path is a short horror game inspired by the tale of Little Red Ridinghood.

In 2009 we also released, Fatale based on the play Salome by Oscar Wilde. Fatale explores the story of Salomé in motion and stilness. An interactive vignette much like an explorable painting.

The Graveyard is quiet and short experience about death and life we released in 2008 to wide acclaim and controversy. In 2009 we also put an iphone version of The Graveyard on the AppStore.

Also in 2009 we created Vanitas a virtual box of treasures for iPhone and iPod touch.