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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."
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.
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.
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)