Perhaps the most fortuitous moment for Bobby Kotick happened in 1983 at a party in Dallas. Kotick was a junior at the University of Michigan, and the party was a swank charity dinner known as the Cattle Baron’s Ball. In attendance with the tycoons of West Texas was Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino developer, who was introduced to Kotick by the mother of one of Kotick’s friends. When Wynn mentioned he was on his way to New York, Kotick asked if he could tag along. (“He was hitchhiking,” Wynn recalls in an email.)

When they reached cruising altitude in Wynn’s private DC9, Kotick started telling the gambling titan about his plan to launch a software company that would develop programs for the Apple computer; a day later, Wynn, impressed by the young student’s verve, wrote Kotick a check for $300,000 to use as seed money for his startup.
 
Kotick, now the 44-year-old C.E.O. of videogame company Activision, has been cutting audacious deals his entire business life, and he recently made his boldest move yet: a proposed merger of Activision and Vivendi Games valued at $9.8 billion. The deal, expected to close in the first half of 2008, will create the world’s largest videogame company, with Kotick at its helm, and it will place Electronic Arts, the decade-long leader, in Kotick’s rearview mirror—though not far enough behind for him to rest too comfortably. The new company, to be called Activision Blizzard, is projected to have a combined revenue of $3.8 billion in fiscal 2007, just beating Electronic Arts’ estimated $3.5 billion to $3.7 billion.
 
A few weeks after the merger announcement, Kotick was feeling that mix of emotions—elation and concern—that comes after having won a hard-fought battle, the uneasy sense of triumph that compels a quick look over the shoulder. “There’s definitely a sentiment of immense gratification,” he says. “But there’s also the anxiety that you now have to maintain it. We’ve been in the No. 2 position for so long, I don’t think you ever want to lose that focus of trying harder.”
 
In a $40 billion industry that’s often compared to Hollywood—videogame “studios” are judged by how many hits they produce; sequels to bestselling titles are common; and scriptwriters and actors help produce games—Kotick has wielded a steady, no-nonsense hand. When he acquired Activision and installed himself as C.E.O. in 1991, he staffed the faltering company with more business-minded types—executives with consumer marketing experience or business school credentials—than his competitors, whose focus, he says, was heavily on software coders and the technology faithful, who “may not know a balance sheet from a bedsheet.”
 
“Bobby is a guy who has a really clear idea of where he wants to go,” says John Taylor, managing director of Arcadia Investments, who has tracked Activision for the past 14 years as an industry analyst. “He’s been good at building competent teams, [having] folks around him who can execute. But Bobby also brings a certain amount of charisma and aplomb in the way he communicates. He knows what to say to investors.”