“All my life, I’ve been the rebel in the X-wing fighter, and then one morning I woke up and I was on board the Death Star.”

– Bobby Kotick, speaking at the DICE Summit 2010 in Las Vegas

Excuse me?

This douchebag took the stage at the DICE Summit and started spewing bullshit in an attempt, as Wired put it, “to paint Activision Blizzard as a company that embraces creativity and downplay its image as a marketing-driven game factory.”  He did this in part by trying to humanize himself with tales of woe about failing to gobble up a couple of developers,  and also by saying, “If you want to retain your identity and culture, [Activision is] a really great mothership.  If you want to sell out…there are definitely other companies to talk to.”

Here are a couple pointers, Bobby: when you’re trying to reshape your image as an evil overlord, don’t fucking admit to being on board the Death Star.  It doesn’t matter if it’s a joke or not.  And don’t tell a story about how badly you wish you would’ve bought Harmonix because it would probably have been “a profitable opportunity” for you.  Talk about how you’re sorry you missed out on it because they were working on something fresh and new, and you wanted to be the one to bring it to the world.  Or how passionate the developers were.  But obviously you wouldn’t have any idea what passion really means, since you go on to say that you couldn’t be bothered to even meet with Will Wright when Maxis was for sale, just when he was finishing up SimCity 2000 and beginning work on a project codenamed “Jefferson” (which turned out to be The Sims).  And don’t — you know what?  Nevermind.  You clearly just don’t get it.

Kotick’s been the CEO of Activision for just shy of two decades.  In 2008, his compensation reportedly totaled nearly $29 MILLION — to be precise (and because it’s far more mind-boggling to see it written in bold with all eight figures): $28,931,939.00.  There’s no conceivable way this jackoff has any memory of what it was like to be “the rebel in the X-wing fighter.”  Personally the only image my mind can produce when I think of Bobby Kotick and Star Wars is that pudgy face of his on Darth Vader’s body, towering over some poor developer whose hand he’s just sliced off, saying “join me and together we shall rule the galaxy!”

The other image my mind conjures up when I think of Bobby Kotick in just about any capacity is this one: