who had been creating toys and robots in his spare time. The company saw the potential to adapt these toys and character designs into a game, with technical engineer Robert Leyland applying his hobby in building electronics. Coincidentally, Activision merged with Vivendi Games in 2008, and asked Toys for Bob to create a new game around Vivendi's Spyro franchise. The studio saw the potential for toy–game interaction and suggested to Activision that it would be ideal for Spyros universe of characters. Their team also saw it as an opportunity to make use of their passion for and experience in creating monsters. Activision CEO Bobby Kotick responded well to the idea and gave them an additional year of development to better refine the gameplay, technology, and manufacturing process. Activision believed that the technology would be ideal for Nintendo's properties: they asked Toys for Bob to present the concept to Nintendo early in its development cycle, but Nintendo decided to limit their role to marketing the title for the Wii. This culminated in the 2011 release of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, which became a breakthrough success. They followed this with Skylanders: Giants in 2012, allowing the series to earn a billion dollars in sales just 15 months after the release of the first game. These successes led Gamasutra to list Toys for Bob among their top developers for 2012, stating, "we're not just impressed that Toys for Bob successfully pulled Skylanders off—it sold massively, after all—we're impressed by how ballsy it was to begin with". Multiple publications have credited Skylanders with creating the toys-to-life genre, attracting competitors such as Nintendo, Disney, and the Lego Group to the multi-billion-dollar market sector. In the years that followed, Toys for Bob created several successful Skylanders video games, including Skylanders: Trap Team. Their last game in this series was Skylanders: Imaginators in 2016, which won several awards. However, slower sales and increased competition suggested that toys-to-life games might have hit their peak, and Activision decided to discontinue the Skylanders series. Still, the Skylanders series became one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. In late 2018, Toys for Bob donated hundreds of Skylanders toys to The Strong National Museum of Play, which planned to use them as an exhibit to document "one of the most significant game franchises of the last decade". Toys for Bob continued their development for important licenses under Activision. They worked