After Electronic Arts said it will not renew its takeover bid for videogame house Take-Two, Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick wrote EA CEO John Riccitiello a letter asking if his company could please present itself to EA management before it makes any final decisions. Riccitiello relented. Zelnick's goal: Convinve EA to raise its current offer to buy Take-Two from $25.74 per share, a price Zelnick says "undervalues Take-Two's franchise and financial performance." For his part, Riccitiello announced over the weekend EA would allow its bid to lapse this evening because it would be impossible to get any deal done before the start of the holiday shopping season. Take-Two shares are down 2.5 percent on today's trading. We always thought PowerPoint was a bit of a buzzkill.

Rejected by Take-Two management, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello will take his bid to acquire the rival videogame maker straight to its shareholders, the Wall Street Journal reports. It's not quite the kind of violent carjacking you'd see in Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto, but that's how we'd like to imagine it, OK? EA has told shareholders it will buy outstanding Take-Two shares for $26 each. That's the same price Riccitiello offered last month, when it was a 50 percent premium over Take-Two's share price.

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello isn't content to sit idly by twiddling his thumbs until retirement. He'd rather spend as much as possible to keep his company relevant to the vanishing-attention-span generation of males whose spending pads his pension. They're interested in fast cars and sports — which makes Riccitiello keenly interested in EA rival Take-Two. Riccitiello has placed a $2 billion bid on Take-Two Interactive, the notorious publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series.

Curious: It's in Electronics Arts CEO John Riccitiello's best interest to get the company's board replaced, or the company sold. If only he were working at Yahoo, Microsoft would have a much easier time of things. EA has penned a "Key Employee Continuity Plan," a nice little safety net for its executives. If Riccitiello is fired without cause after a change in corporate control, he would receive $2.3 million. And 18 months of health coverage. God knows insurance can be expensive.

A leaked internal email indicates that the videogame behemoth Electronic Arts is vying to slash staff. The first of EA's studios CEO John Riccitiello will slash are Mythic and EA Redwood Shores. The email issued to Mythic employees says it will trim down through "attrition, performance management, stricter hiring guidelines and layoffs." Apparently, EA has started handing out pink slips, with more to follow. Would this have anything to do with EA's grand $860 million acquisition of BioWare and Pandemic Studios? Riccitiello spearheaded the purchase of both in 2005 when he was at private-equity firm Elevation Partners. What a lovely modus operandi: Profit today, screw people out of their jobs tomorrow.