Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate) bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit.

In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know what we want to do" event, just a couple years later they then decided they wanted to sell their main french telecom company (SFR) and at the same time bought Gameloft and agressively bought Ubisoft shares (the two biggest french video games companies).