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The History of Electronic Arts
Gamasutra is running an extensive article today on the long history of Electronic Arts. Starting all the way back with the days of Trip Hawkins, they move through the days of Madden, Nintendo, small studio purchases and, of course, the Sims. There's also an a whole series of images associated with the article, letting you look back and chuckle about the cover art of games from the past. The article concludes: "Art and commerce have always been uneasy bedfellows, and nowhere is that tension more evident than in the world of video games. Perhaps after looking at the history of Electronic Arts we may have some insight into that hot point of ignition where business and inspiration combine to create cutting edge games. As Trip Hawkins explained, 'Entrepreneurship is a creative art form. Like other creative people, we do it because we have to do it. We have no choice but to express ourselves in this way. But of course like all artists we are optimists, so we believe good things will come ... It is not about making money, it is about making a difference.'"
It is not about making money, it is about making a difference.
So says the company that charges me $60 a year so I can keep my Madden rosters up to date...and not much else.
yeah, EA is a very successful company. But in terms of true originality? They've sucked for years.
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That all the conference rooms in EA has glass walls because one of the managers got caught playing doctor with his secretary? (This was, of course, long before the Sims came around.)
I have heard that EA initially thought the Sims was going to be a big failure and tried to kill it six times during its development. Can anyone confirm?
Ah, hard hat mack. The memories...
I had the "We See Farther" poster up in my room when I was a teenager. I wonder if there are still copies of that around. I would write programs on my Vic-20 and dream about being a cool developer. What a flood of memories this article brings back.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
History of EA:
1) Make programmers work tons and tons of overtime.
2) ???
3) Profit!
"But of course like all artists we are optimists, so we believe good things will come ... It is not about making money, it is about making a difference."
Yes, that's why several pessimistic overworked artists sued EA - to make a difference.
The part of this article I found interesting was the rationale behind publishing for every platform, thereby keeping one company from coming too strongly to the fore and charging exorbinant license fees.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
I always think of EA in its mid '80s form, back when their logo was also their loading screen. (I could swear I read somewhere that the circle was a softball that got lodged in the typesetting, but maybe that's my imagination.) I suppose the point of the Gamasutra article is, in part, that during that period, EA put its designers out there, front and center, whereas nowadays, they're more an amalgam of smaller studios.
One thing that always stuck with me was how, upon seeing the cover for Pinball Construction Set, everyone would assume that the game was called "Bill Budge." Even Sid Meier didn't get that big a billing!
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before they became EA.
In the 80's, Electronic Arts published or made good games like Populous, One on One, Wasteland (one of my favorites still) and other titles. Then they began to buy up companies like Origin Systems and other companies (Westwood, etc) and those companeis that got bought, began to decline. OSI for example, floundered with Ultima 8, and Ultima 9 turned out to be a big stinker. Westwood Studios turned out crap like Command and Conquer 2 under EA, and Generals was devoid of content.
Their sports franchise while quite decent on consoles, was shitty on PCs, and their yearly refreshes didn't bring that many changes.
Electronic Arts today is now comparable to Microsoft. They release potentially good games with a lot of bugs, and they have a stifling effect on competitors they buy.
From a recent article on Wright by John Seabrook:
"When Wright took his idea to the Maxis board of directors, Jeff Braun says, "The board looked at The Sims and said, 'What is this? He wants to do an interactive doll house? The guy is out of his mind.' " Doll houses were for girls, and girls didn't play video games. Maxis gave little support or financing for the game. Electronic Arts, which bought Maxis in 1997, was more enthusiastic. (Wright received seventeen million dollars in E.A. stock for his share of the company.)
Wright's games are so different from E.A.'s other releases that it was hard to imagine the two being united in the same enterprise. But the success of SimCity had already established Sim as a strong brand, and E.A., which by then, fifteen years after its founding, was becoming a Procter & Gamble-style brand-management company, foresaw the possibility of building a Sim franchise. Released in 2000, The Sims was an immediate hit; it went on to become the best-selling P.C. game of all time.
E.A. has since licensed it to many other playing platforms, and issues regular Sims "expansion packs," featuring new content, like Livin' Large, House Party, and Hot Date. (Wright worked on The Sims 2, which was a major redesign, but he has had nothing to do with the expansion packs.)"
Perhaps you were thinking of the NES version? Or the C64 version?
Not great, but still better than the screenshot you found.
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Topic says it all really. They could just have continued to do that and I would have liked them.
Look for "The History of EA '08" following the success of this artical.
plbbbt! It's not about money?
You're telling me it's not about money? So, it is then?
What the hell? How do they do a history and skip this?!?!
...for grinding Origin into dust. Origin might not have helped its own cause, this has been well documented, but it's hard not to see EA as a pimp or drug pusher who sold your best friend a fatal dose. Origin's only real fault was their optimism, which was the same thing that gave us such great games.
The fact that they didn't see Origin as something worth saving or keeping intact shows their absolute ignorance. How else would they manage to let Everquest steal MMO leadership from them? WoW and its 800 lb. gorilla status (of which EA is no doubt green with envy) is the logical conclusion of Richard Garriott's vision.
Games like Wing Commander and Ultima 7 are as golden as ANY developer has been, period. Why someone not want to nuture an environment that produces such things at *all* costs is beyond me. Of course, bean counters don't play games now, do they?
Fuck you EA. No, sincerely, fuck you.
"I mean, does anyone really care about Madden anymore or is buying it just a ritual some gamers go through every year?"
Maybe you need to get off the slashwagon and realize that EA produces more than just sports titles. And in answer to your question. People are buying Madden and other sports titles, just like people are going to football, and other sports games. Don't let your hatred for "jocks" color your opinions. Sports is big business, for both EA and other game companies, and it will be that way as long as people enjoy sports.
This reads a lot like a press release. I don't visit Gamasutra often enough to know if this is par for the course there, but doesn't this sound like the kind of spin a corporate PR flak would apply to the bare, historical facts? Hawkins quote; "We had to rebuild the industry brick by brick over a period of years." Gee, all by yourself??? The writer makes a lot out of how designers got credit, including the photo montage with the cool game packaging - designer names prominently displayed. So, when and why did that policy change? Silence. And this tidbit: >Using this knowledge as leverage in his negotiations with Sega, Hawkins threatened to release >games for the Genesis without a license unless Sega agreed to more favorable terms for EA. It was >a very risky move that could have had expensive legal consequences. > >Fortunately, Sega recognized the benefits of working out a deal with Hawkins. A reporter might use the word "extortion" to describe this sort of behavior. I could point out more examples, but hey, let's ALL play!
There's nothing intrinsically evil about making money; it all depends on how you make it. EA does it by being honest and ruthless, by taking advantage of every opportunity and every bit of leverage they can muster, and bargaining incredibly hard. A lot of naive early game developers ended up feeling very badly treated because of the way EA played hardball. EA brought professionalism and grown-up business practices to what was at the time an adolescent industry make up mostly of nerds. They made the game industry what it is today -- both for good and for ill. And in the process, they made their shareholders a hell of a lot of money.
I piss off bigots.
As far as I remember, MULE was my first intro to EA. And I've been waiting for a sequel for oh... about 25 years...
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The sad thing is that EA is a company that started out with a commitment toward innovation in game design and games as an art form (Look at that initial lineup of games!) and has turned into a company whose continued existence is largely based on churning out annual sequels to sports titles. There was a time when the name of Electronic Arts on the package was a strong incentive for me to buy, whereas today it is a negative.
Is this even remotely plausible? Most of the people that I knew back then who played PC games would not have been caught dead playing a game on the Atari 2600, with its blocky graphics, so how could the failure of the 2600 have "spread" to them. Even the coin arcades suffered, and this was a time of great creativity in coin arcade game design.
I think that it is far more plausible that Atari was simply the canary in the coal mine--the earliest and most visible symptom of the end of the video game fad. Because at one point enthusiasm was so high that virtually any game would sell, and because the user-base of Atari 2600s was so high, many publishers were seriously overextended with investments in 2600 game development. So when the fad ended, they were the first to take the fall. As is so often the case after a fad, there was a reaction in which that which was cool became decidedly uncool. It was only after that reaction subsided that it was possible for publishers and developers to build a more healthy game industry in which games sold in competition with other media on the basis of the entertainment value rather than their novelty.
Anyone see that one small mention of the game, Majestic failing? I remember that. In 2001, fall, there was a beta out for an EA based Battletech game. It was really fun, they had all the cool mechs in it, and the only annoying part in the game was how hit registration was handled. Anyways, Long story short at some point EA said, "Ok... our choices are This cool battletech game, or Majestic...uh...we're going for magestic." and closed the beta on one of the coolest mech games I've played. A month or so later, Majestic was in the bargain bin and completely offline. Grats EA! You're stupid!
1. Find a game people like 2. Make a new version of game every year with little to no change from previous year ...
3. Profit
I remember playing NHL 98 at a friends house back in the last millennium, and I remember it being pretty fun too but me not being very interested in hockey I never thought much of it after that. Or at least not until my friend and I once more sat down for a nights worth of competing on the ice a few years later, now with a new version of EA's NHL, soon after realizing we'd be better off in the 98 version instead. Which was really the end of my relationship with EA published games, I had liked wasteland, evenmore so when it sprung a "spiritual" sequal in form of Black Isle's Fallout, and I had also had a good time in Ultima Online, but whenever I later considered picking up a title published by EA it always made me think of NHL 98 and I decided to go else where, like picking Pro evolution soccer over fifa and so on. I'm not however resentful toward EA, not at all in fact, I just don't buy their games.
Which brings me to the trend that flows through responses whenever someone brings up EA on the Internets, because lets face it, EA have a neck for getting negative responses no matter what the story goes on. It's always made me wonder too, because alot of the negativity comes from people who buy their new EA games whenever an upgrade is available, like people owning every version of Madden, Call of Duty, Battlefield and so on. It's not that I can't understand the frustration of having to buy the same game repeatetly, it's more that I don't understand why people do it when they complain about it afterwards...
To me it seems like the story of EA is much more than a trip down memory lane, it's also a story of how big publishers slowly but surely came to own the market, because consumers bought into their advertisement, the updated roosters, and so on, picking up games they, to some extend, already owned beforehand because they knew ecatly what they were getting rather than taking a chance on some unheard of game from a small publisher. But that doesn't really make EA guilty of anything, I mean, in what line of business don't you want to own your market if you can?