As Microsoft starts to slowly acknowledge that spending a cool $69 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard may not have been the most financially sound idea, it’s been revealed that one of the studios bundled in the deal used the merger as an opportunity to escape. In an interview with GamesRadar+, Toys for Bob studio head Paul Yan said the merger offered the team a chance to “take back creative control of the kinds of projects that we can focus on.”
Toys for Bob has a long history of working on the kind of video game you’d find buried in a giant bin of miscellaneous titles in a Walmart in 2003. In 2005, it was acquired by Activision, where it went on to create the Skylanders series known for its menagerie of collectible “toys-to-life” figurines. Toys for Bob also worked on the most recent Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon games, essentially keeping the early PS2 era platformer mascots alive. But being owned by Activision meant that sometimes Toys for Bob would get tapped to assist other developers with bigger projects.
“One of the changes at the company was that there was a corporate mandate to support the large blockbuster IPs – Warzone, Modern Warfare, Overwatch 2, just to name a few,” Yan said.
The shift made Toys for Bob the object of community jokes about Activision sending the team known for its whimsical fantasy platformers to the online shooter development mines. While Yan said that the opportunity to work on such different types of games was a good learning experience, he also said that it took the team away from the kinds of projects they were passionate about. To get back to those projects, Toys for Bob approached Microsoft’s leadership with a plan to essentially buy the studio out and spin it off into an independent entity. The goal, Yan said, was to “get back to the games we were known for, and also to preserve the tight-knit team, and all the long tenure that we’ve built up over the years.”
The studio left Activision in 2024, and now we can see the fruition of the great Toys for Bob jailbreak with the announcement of Spyro: A Realm Beyond.