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How Toys for Bob turned Activision into a giant toy company with Skylanders (interview)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 10 min

Paul Reiche III is the president of Activision Blizzard’s Toys for Bob game studio. The company labored in obscurity for decades, but last year’s Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure put Reiche’s team in the spotlight. The hybrid toy-game combination was the most successful new video game of 2011. It’s spurred the sales of 40 million Skylanders toys, and many of those are being used to activate characters in video games sold alongside the collectible figures. So far, Skylanders has been the top-selling game of the year for Activision.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.