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| Founded By: | Trip Hawkins |
| Location: | Redwood Shores Parkway, Redwood City, California, USA |
| Year Started: | 1982 |
| Year Wound Up: | |
| Titles in Database: | 164 |
| Rights Now With: | ? |
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| In February 1982, Trip Hawkins arranged a meeting with Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital to discuss financing his new venture, Amazin' Software. Valentine encouraged Hawkins to leave Apple Inc., in which Hawkins served as Director of Product Marketing, and allowed Hawkins use of Sequoia Capital's spare office space to start the company. On 28 May 1982, Trip Hawkins incorporated and established the company with a personal investment of an estimated US$200,000. Seven months later in December 1982, Hawkins secured US$2 million of venture capital from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sevin Rosen Funds.
For more than seven months, Hawkins refined his Electronic Arts business plan. With aid from his first employee (with whom he worked in marketing at Apple), Rich Melmon, the original plan was written, mostly by Hawkins, on an Apple II in Sequoia Capital's office in August 1982. During that time, Hawkins also employed two of his former staff from Apple, Dave Evans and Pat Marriott, as producers, and a Stanford MBA classmate, Jeff Burton from Atari for international business development. The business plan was again refined in September and reissued on 8 October 1982. Between September and November, employee headcount rose to 11, including Tim Mott, Bing Gordon, David Maynard, and Steve Hayes. Having outgrown the office space provided by Sequoia Capital, the company relocated to a San Mateo office that overlooked the San Francisco Airport landing path. Headcount rose rapidly in 1983, including Don Daglow, Richard Hilleman, Stewart Bonn, David Gardner, and Nancy Fong. |
Titles per Year
Breakdown by Genre
Breakdown by Platform
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Added: 2 Aug 2018
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Added: 19 Sep 2016
When Trip Hawkins founded EA, he did it under the then-novel premise of an independent publisher; EA would run no internal studios, would produce no development of its own. Instead it would scout out, publish, and distribute the work of outside developers, operating under the early Activision principle of promoting programmers and designers nearly as much as the games they developed.
The name itself (based in part on United Artists) is telling; EA existed to proselytize the burgeoning art of electronic games; to act as a popular outlet for the voiced, yet scattered and unheard "software artists".
If anything, EA was positioned as – from a certain perspective – an improvement upon Activision's founding ideals, out record-labeling the record producer even down to the packaging. Whereas Activision served to broadcast the names and statements of its own – of the disgruntled superstars of bestsellers past – Trip Hawkins wanted to dig up new talent; to act as a sort of equalizer so your future Richard Garriots would have somewhere to turn. And hey, if those future talents happened to hit it off and make EA a bundle of money – then... well!
Indeed, EA started off well enough. In 1982, Hawkins left Apple Computer (formed in part thanks to Atari; see "Five that Fell" on this site), taking along several of his coworkers to staff his new venture. The initial plan, later put fully into gear by Larry Probst, was to sell directly to retailers – again an unprecedented idea – rather than work through a third party, the idea being that, as a professional conduit of other people's work, EA needed the best profit margins and market know-how in the business. The trade-off was that EA promoted its artists to the teeth and shared a large chunk of the profits.
Successful Donkey
Beyond promising, EA's initial 1983 software lineup has become legendary: Archon, Pinball Construction Set, and M.U.L.E, along with the successful Donkey Kong knock-off Hard Hat Mac and a lesser-known worm-training game.
For the next few years, EA would continue much in this vein, offering its distribution services to other publishers (EA didn't put out enough games to maintain its channels alone) and irritating figures such as Richard Garriot due to what he perceived as a focus on showy marketing over quality product. Regardless, through the mid '80s EA would release such landmarks as Seven Cities of Gold, The Bard's Tale, Starflight, and Wasteland. EA began to experiment with licenses, especially celebrity-based ones – especially sports-based ones. And then... something strange began to stir. Despite all its early proclamations, EA began to get the artistic itch itself.
The result, in 1987, was Skate or Die! – a sort of a cross between Summer Games and 720°, taking the Olympic format of the former and the stylization and catch phrase from the latter. And it wasn't bad! Getting ported to the NES by Konami a full year before 720° hardly hurt, either. Speaking from my own experience, all the kids just assumed it was the NES port of their favorite arcade game from last summer. Surreptitious, though not altogether undeserved, win for EA. Since no one really complained, EA took silence as a blessing and forged ahead. Slowly, over the next few years, EA began to move more development in-house.
Around 1990, EA decided it wanted a part of Sega's new console, and yet – like Accolade (and Atari Games with the NES, before them both) – they didn't care for Sega's licensing fees, preferring to manufacture their own cartridges. A few legal threats later, EA and Sega worked out a deal, though EA continued to manufacture its own oddly-shaped cartridges – and it is within these cartridges, combined with EA's experience with celebrity sport licenses, that EA hit its true goldmine.
Repackage essentially the same game year after year, adjusting its roster and adding a few mechanics to stay current, and sell it for full price over and over – it was a whole new model for game publishing. Both disposable and mass-market; buy it one year, you have to buy all of the upgrades if you want to stay current.
In 1991, before this circus got on the road, Trip Hawkins left to follow a new muse (one the world would soon know as the 3D0), leaving his company in the very rational hands of Larry Probst. At the time it seemed a reasonable business decision; Hawkins was more a game developer than a businessman, and after a decade his original ideals were making overt growth harder and shareholders impatient – so Probst knew exactly what to do.
Acquisitions Frenzy
No sooner was Hawkins out the door than the acquisitions (and Madden milking) began. The first came in 1991, with Stunts developer Distinctive Software (later to become SSX and NBA Live studio EA Canada). A year later, fate frowned on Origin; Probst picked them up and set 'em under the eye of Distinctive founder Don Mattrick, who applied a strict discipline whether required or not.
Some staff began to draw conspiracies, or at least detect a conflict of interest, due to the shared resources between Origin and Mattrick's own EA Canada: the less for one, the more for the other. The battles here are many and famous, Mattrick enforcing a policy of big blockbuster games over small, reasonably profitable projects, then holding the blockbusters to an impossible schedule.
The strained relationship with Origin presages a decade-long streak of what could easily be called ruthlessness. In 1995 EA bought out Bullfrog, another wunderkind-led brainstorm house; within two years, its chief Peter Molyneux left to start a new studio, complaining of similar interference; by 2001 Bullfrog was closed.
After Bullfrog, the acquisitions went into rapid fire, at least one a year, nearly every year: Lost in L.A. developer Manley & Associates (1996); Maxis (1997); Westwood and Tiburon (1998); pioneering online developer Kesmai (1999); Dreamworks Interactive (2000); former Sega Sports studio Black Box (2002); racing game developer Studio 33 and PC port master NuFX (2003); Criterion (2005); and three more studios this year: JAMDAT Mobile, Mythic, and DICE.
Tallying in spin-off studios, that's an average of 1.2 acquisitions a year since 1991 – half that, within the current hardware generation. Of the total, one-third have since been closed – all, again, within the past five years. All save Origin, Bullfrog, Maxis, and DICE have been renamed after their parent company, either in part or in whole.
The pattern to these acquisitions, if not universal, is infamous: find a company that made a really popular game, acquire the company and its properties; then set the team on churning out sequel after sequel to the game in question. Sometimes, likely not by design, the staff leaves or burns out, or one of the products sells poorly; the studio is closed or subsumed. Of EA's acquisitions, only Maxis is known for retaining its autonomy and culture within the EA corporate structure, the jewel in EA's crown.
EA seemed to have abandoned all of its founding principles and developed an attitude of rapid growth whatever the long-term cost, thereby setting a poor example for the rest of the industry. But it's not all bad news. The firm has set its sight on growth through creativity, and has been forced to come to terms with the costs of its own ambitions.
Thanks in part to Erin Hoffman and a high-profile class action lawsuit, that overtime business in particular (90-hour weeks, no compensation) has come under close scrutiny, bringing Larry Probst's EA into a critical light. When, therefore, EA decided to buy up 20% of one of its closest rivals, freaking out Ubisoft, everyone's eyes were turned to EA, glaring, almost daring them to take the next step – a step which has, as yet, not manifested itself… |
The Retro Isle team
Added: 29 Oct 2025
Click here to view a list of titles we have in the database here at Retro Isle. |
Added: 19 Sep 2016
An Interview with Trip Hawkins on the 3DO.
A STAB IN THE BACK
Trip Hawkins is sitting in a leather armchair in the center of a large co-working room in downtown San Mateo that is mostly empty of people.
He is lean, in his early 60s, his hair dark, slick and neat. He is dressed in smart pants and an expensive-looking open-necked shirt.
He speaks quietly but intensely about the company he founded more than 30 years before, the game publisher he built into one of the most successful in the world, before he left to embark on a risky gamble to reinvent the console business.
“In hindsight,†he says, “I’d have rather just stayed at EA.â€
Hawkins, a Steve Jobs acolyte during Apple’s 1970s origins, founded EA in 1982. Based on his observations of Jobs in his prime, Hawkins hired a strong executive team, made far-sighted business decisions and built a company that, by the end of the decade, was publicly traded and reaping revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. He was one of the most powerful executives who ever bestrode the game industry.
He tried to create a game publishing company built on the belief that creative talent comes first. In the early 1990s, he pulled off an extraordinary coup, reverse engineering the Sega Genesis in order to push back against console manufacturers’ harsh royalties systems, which kept game publishers in thrall to the Japanese giants.
Understanding that the console makers would fight back, he decided to build a game console that did not take large royalties from game makers, that allowed creators more freedom.
The 3DO was a bold attempt to make the console world more like the PC world, where creators and consumers — not electronics companies — acted as gatekeepers.
In order to devote himself to 3DO, Hawkins stepped down as boss of EA, putting his head of sales in charge of the publisher while he continued as both chairman of EA’s board and head of 3DO.
The relationship between 3DO and EA soured. Hawkins’ missionary zeal to push back against the console makers did not fit with the EA executive team’s financial goals, which were increasingly focused on a (strategically correct) belief that Sony would create huge new revenue opportunities with its PlayStation console. When Sony came into the console market, EA walked back much of its support for 3DO and threw its lot in with the PlayStation.
Hawkins has never forgiven EA.
“I realized that EA was stabbing us in the back,†he says. “They were not going to have any exclusive games on 3DO. They were all going to show up on PlayStation. We needed to have some first-party games. We didn’t have a choice.â€
3DO began making games. “EA’s attitude was, ‘You can’t do that,’†says Hawkins. EA believed that, if 3DO was in the business of making games as well as hardware, then Hawkins’ new venture was now a competitor. “Well, we had to do it. I was advised legally I couldn’t be chairman of both these companies.â€
The 3DO failed, trampled underfoot by the console companies, which subsidized manufacturing costs through game royalty charges, and so came to market with lower prices.
Despite the long, painful failure of The 3DO Company, Hawkins remains active in gaming. He founded mobile company Digital Chocolate in 2003. Today he is running a game subscription service that aims to teach emotional intelligence to kids.
“I really am more of a game developer; I’m more of a content guy,†he says. “I’ve been around hardware quite a bit, but I’ve really just seen hardware as a means to an end.â€
He may never again come close to the heights of his EA success, during those years when the company shaped the meaning of game publishing in the United States and Europe, when it sought to challenge the console makers, when it briefly tried to create a haven for the most creative game makers, when it marketed computer games as emotionally challenging works of art.
"I’ve been around hardware quite a bit, but I’ve really just seen hardware as a means to an end."
Today’s EA is known as a safe publishing umbrella for multi-iterated, highly polished, mega-marketed brands like FIFA, Battlefield and Need For Speed. It is a company that prides itself on creating and marketing games based on observed play analytics and consumer research.
EA’s recent E3 press conference, which showed off highly anticipated titles like Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, Star Wars: Battlefront, Unravel and a new Mass Effect, demonstrated that the company has a solid take on what consumers want to play, as well as a talented pool of creators and planners. Polygon’s 2014 game of the year was an EA production, Dragon Age: Inquisition.
But it is also a company with plenty of critics, who see it as the epitome of a bland, money-grubbing corporate megalith, divorced from the concerns of gamers. This is a charge that EA spokespeople vehemently deny.
Thirty years after EA was founded, many of the ideas that Hawkins espoused have come to fruition across the industry. Game developers are receiving unprecedented personal branding and earning power. Open platforms represent a valid and vibrant alternative to consoles. Games are widely viewed as emotionally fulfilling art.
But Hawkins does not see EA today as being like the company that he built — and certainly not the catalyst for positive change. “It became kind of a factory,†he says. “They got to be pretty good at cranking out EA Sports games. Man, they got good at that. But they really didn’t do much of anything else, did they?â€
Things were different back in the ’80s … |
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