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Trip Hawkins Blasts Everybody
An anonymous reader writes "Trip Hawkins, founder of EA, sent in a hilarious two page letter to the editor in response to last week's Trip Hawkins is the Antichrist article in the Escapist. Among the Tripisms is a call for the Garriotts to stop being self-righteous about lawsuits and just 'play the game...'" From the article: "This article comes as a bit of a surprise to me. Not the lead quote, because my success with EA did indeed unnerve many competitors who wanted to externalize blame for their problems. But disparaging my commitment to quality, putting words in my mouth, and saying they never would have sold the company if I had been involved - these inaccuracies paint a very wrong picture."
We're talking about a man with a long history of being a particularly nasty shark in the game industry-- do you think he's really going to take such an article lying down? Really nothing out of the ordinary that there's a reply.
he rebutted several claims made by the article in a salient and reasoned tone. i didnt really detect much 'blasting'. probably why hes a CEO, and not a programmer.
What's so hilarious about this response? Hawkins is a businessman first, always has been, and I don't doubt that all of his decisions are made in light of the bottom line with no "personal feelings" attached whatsoever (okay, maybe aside from the 3DO). But if the article misquotes him, he should have every right to respond to correct that. As for his "committment to quality" EA does have a lot of award winning games, but great things can be accomplished when you treat your labor pool like slaves, just look at the pyramids.
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The Garriotts nonetheless decided to make me out to be the villain and the scapegoat for their troubles, while clinging to various false beliefs about what had happened. In the first place, they should have been able to keep things in perspective as a contract dispute in a business setting, and just played the game.
But that's the game! If you screwed your partner, you know you're guilty and that they are bound to win if the case gets all the way through the court, the move in the game is to yell "I'M BEING PERSECUTED! THIS VILLAIN IS DOING THEIR PERSONAL VENDETTA!!!" in order to intimidate the PR dept of the partner so they drop charges and make it look to everyone else that you're not guilty - even if the jury decides you are, and you have to pay, you don't lose face in front of other partners you'd like to screw, because they may believe "you poor thing".
On the other hand, the letter FTA is the opponent's move in the same game.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I dunno about the rest of you but I didn't find anything hilarious about the 2 page letter. Sounds to me people are playing the blame game here.
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I didn't see anything particularly nasty about Trip in his response. He didn't even appear particularly interested in placing game, but rather cleaing the air that the dispute was simply a matter of contract issues that required external resolution.
Now, does that make him evil or not? Well, I don't know. A lot of people may hate EA because of their offensive approach to things like getting exclusive NFL rights, and things like that, but in my mind that's the price of business. It's his job to make EA as much money as possible, and he definitely appears to be doing a good job at it. If you don't like it, don't buy EA's games. Yeah, I hate the idea that nobody else can make NFL titles, too, and I'm not a big fan of most of EA's games, but they must be doing something right or else they wouldn't be in the position that they are in today.
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This magazine actually interests me for the first time. If an industry insider is allowed a letter to the editor, that's a major feat, normally most letter in this area are just bleh.
The letter does make sense, and it probably explains a bit more. But I have to believe the Garrotts also played dirty pool at the time, along with EA's staff. Doesn't mean either wins the arguement, but doesn't mean we should fault EA either.
We currently believe that EA are evil bastards, but that doesn't mean that's not how shit was done in the early 80s, look at Nintendos proactive strategies to making sure their game makers only made games for their own company. Nowerdays we all react and recoil from some practices but in the early 80s that was part of the legalese for the game industry. Just because time advances and methods drop out of style, morals change, and new info comes to light doesn't mean that it's reprehensable when they were used.
Hell the second half of the original article basically tell how the company's money line was screwed, and it doesn't look like it's EA's fault, hiring more people and taking on more responsibility is a risk, and they had monetary investments that failed fast. And that's probably the most damming.
But the letter itself is very interesting in a perspective of an 80s style executive at a game company, something most people don't get to see even today. (Gates and Balmer hide behind so many layer like an onion we'll never see their real face. Most other CEOs are hidden as well) So that in itself makes this very interesting.
Maybe Trip will hire Thompson and sue The Escapist...
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Hey Zonk! Way to slip in a link to last week's escapist, ya bastard!!!
More like an anonymous idiot submitted this. He obviously is as self righteous as Trip makes the Garriots out to be in the letter. It is neither hilarious or "blast"ing. It's is well reasoned with nothing that can overtly be called out as a mistruth.
Basically we end up with two people (Trip and the Garriots) saying "It wasn't my fault!" - seems like the submitter of this news wants to assume the Garriots were right (though I'm not sure why - even though I have much more respect for them as creative minds than Trip)
"First, I will let history speak for itself in dismissing any charges that I don't care about quality."
The final days of 3DO anyone? Perhaps I am mistaken and maybe it was just a bad industry rumor, but wasn't he in charge when 3DO's management was trying to shovel Army Man games out the door with only 4-6 month dev schedules?
What do I know? I'm just a coward.