TechStuff Classic: The Electronic Arts Story- Part Two

How did the company change after the departure of Trip Hawkins? What were some of the other companies EA acquired? Why did EA win the Worst Company of the Year twice?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. It is time for
a tech Stuff Classic episode. This episode is the part

(00:25):
two to last week's part one, The Electronic Arts Story
Part two. It originally published on May two thousand thirteen,
which is interesting because the previous one published on May,
which means these published back to back. I must have
missed a day or something. But I'm not gonna miss
a beat because we're going to pick up where we

(00:46):
left off and continue the Electronic Arts Story. Let's listen in.
One thing I didn't mention at the end of the
last podcast was that was the year e A purchased
Origin Systems, and that's the game company that was founded
by Rich Garriott, the guy who created the Ultimate series,
and they also had another series. They had James Combat
simulate simulators. They also had the Wing Commander series, and

(01:11):
so that was a big move on their part. But
then we move on into and that's when the three
D O console actually hit the market. Uh, and then
e A also released the first Need for speed for
the three D O because e A was actually a
partner in that three D O console experiment. They were
not the whole owners of that, which I guess in retrospect,

(01:36):
I'm sure the company thinks is a good thing. But
they were partners, so it wasn't like Hawkins had severed
all ties once he left e A. Uh. Now again,
we're not going to mention every single release that Electronics
Arts had um Electronic Arts I should say had throughout
their history. That it would be ridiculous, and you'd also

(01:58):
get tired of hearing A say FIFA. Uh like thirty
or forty time we say FIFA. He's just that word.
First of all, I didn't if you're in the United States,
you're probably thinking, I don't know what that means. And
even if you're not, after you've heard it that many times,
it starts to lose all meeting and become something of
a cone that we're just saying over and over to
achieve enlightenment. But so I don't have anything for for

(02:19):
ninety four, Lauren, do you? I don't want to skip
over you you've got anything that was? That was actually
the year that Hawkins resigned as chairman of the board
for e A. Okay, so now he had actually not
just left as the CEO, but also left the board
of directors. Uh inve e A acquired a company called
bull Frog, which was a game development studio in the

(02:40):
United Kingdom, and they were known for a couple of
different series, their theme park series and their series called Populus.
Did you ever see Populous, Lauren? I did not see Populous.
I did play some of the theme parks. Okay. Well,
Populus was a game where it puts you in the
role essentially as as like a god, and it was
a job to try and shape landscape so that fild

(03:04):
stuff and worship you. Right, yeah, this this is what
m Yeah. Indeed, I was about to say that this
is what I think black and White because that was
the same studio later on Black and White definitely was
was something that was inspired by the populist games. You
could definitely tell that Populus was was not quite as
sophisticated as that, and there were there were different ways

(03:26):
of winning Populace. You had opponents that would also have
their own worshippers, and you were trying to dominate the world.
So if you wanted to go over to the your
opponent's side when your opponent wasn't looking, and start digging
down until all of the villages were submerged in water
and all the little villagers drowned. And it was both

(03:46):
entertaining and horrifying at the same time. All of these series,
by the way, we're serious that he had published and
so um so the acquisition of bull Frog was kind
of a good following steps since they had done pretty well.
Right yeah, now now he has decided that they want
this as an actual part of their development team, not
just a title that they published. Once Bullfrog joined the A,

(04:07):
they the division began to develop the Dungeon Keepers series,
which reached some acclaim I thought, I always thought it
was a very entertaining series. And that same year, in
ninety the Sega Saturn platform launches, and so does a
platform that would become one of the most disruptive platforms
in video game console history, because at this point Nintendo

(04:31):
is pretty much the heavy hitter. I mean, Nintendo is
owning video game consoles. Sega keeps coming out with consoles
that from a specs perspective, might beat out whatever the
Nintendo console is at that time. But but just but
just that the games. The programming that was going on
for Nintendo was incredible, right, Yeah, the Nintendo had all
the momentum, so Sega, while it had its fans, just

(04:53):
didn't have nearly as many as Nintendo did. Well. Was
also when we saw Sony get into the game with
the PlayStation console, and that really shook things up. You know,
a CD based console that had far more graphic ability
than the Nintendo consoles did. Uh. And that that gave
e A a lot of opportunities as well to develop

(05:15):
for yet another platform, because remember e A wants there
to be as many platforms as possible because it means
that no single platform has enough power to tell e
A what to do. Um. And then e A also
starts to port several three d O titles to the Saga, Saturn,
and Sony PlayStation platforms in order to take advantage of
the thirty two bit processing power. So in this sense,

(05:37):
they didn't have to develop new titles. They just had
to retool these titles for the three D OH so
that they would work on these other systems. Now, I say,
just that's still a pretty big thing to have to do,
but it does. It's different from having to build a
game from the ground batch. Yeah, you don't have to
go through the whole conceptual phase at all. Uh. I
don't have anything for ninety six, so we're gonna go

(05:59):
right into nine seven. Sounds good. So e A in
ninety seven acquires Maxis, And this is this is a
big one, folks, because this is the company that was
responsible for sim City. The first sim City game came
out in ninete, so almost a decade earlier, right and
h And since then, will write who is who's the
designer for Maxis had had been making all kinds of
all kinds of related titles as sim Earth, Sam Aunt. Yeah.

(06:22):
I was a big fantasy man. Yeah. Yeah. On the
on the s n E S it was. It was
great Aunt simulation. Man, I got it. Sounds so goofy
and I had so much fun playing it. I'm not
going to argue with the goofy part, but hey, I
like lots of goofy stuff, so I am not one
to talk. And once e A acquires Maxis, that's when
will Wright starts to work on a game that would

(06:43):
become an important part of e A's arsenal. In fact,
you could argue it's the most important game that e
A ever came out with, and that is the SIMS.
So will Wright starts to work on the SIMS back
in ninety seven. It would be a few years before
that game would come out. Uh. E A also gets
into the online gaming market. They launch Ultima Online, which

(07:07):
was one of the earliest, at least one of the
earliest successful massively multiplayer online role playing games in the
Western Hemisphere. So Ultima Online goes live and starts to
prove the model that online gaming could be a thing.
Keeping in mind this is before broadband penetration had really

(07:27):
spread out throughout the United States. Uh, there were people
who are playing this on dial ups. Oh my goodness. Uh.
And so it was you know, this was the earliest
days of that, and it was before really in those days,
it came down to Ultima Online or ever Quest. Those
were the two big names. And it wouldn't be until
the world of Warcraft that that dynamic gets really shaken up. Um,

(07:51):
and you had people who were hardcore fans of one
and hated the other anyway. That that same year, nine seven,
bull Frog chief Peter Mullineux leaves e A to start
a new studio and supposedly one of the reasons he
left was that he felt that e A was getting
two hands on in game development, that they were interfering

(08:13):
too much in the actual development of games, and that
he felt that the pressure was to establish a game
and then just churn out sequels right right, And this
is in U is in direct opposition to eas original
mode of operation, wherein they were they were treating game
developers with extreme respect and kind of letting them do
whatever they wanted on the principle that whatever they wanted

(08:35):
would be awesome. Yeah, and yeah, and but but since
then had, as we discussed in our previous episode, decided
that that, yeah, that that the real way to go
is to create brands and and really um push the brandin,
find a brand that resonates with an audience, and then
all you have to do is keep on creating uh
sequels to that and that, and people will buy it
because you've established an audience for it. This is not

(08:57):
an unusual idea. We see it all across video games.
I mean you could think another media too, of course. Yeah,
you can think of dozens of franchises that exist. Only
you can look at entries to various franchises where you
think this really didn't live up to what the original
was or what later entries were. This was clearly something
where a company was trying to cash in on a

(09:19):
previously existing title. Um and and in some cases it's
it can be the death of a franchise or or
even an entire company. Well. Then moving on, in n
Electronic Arts moves its headquarters from San Mateo to Redwood City,
and e A also acquires yet another company, Westwood Studios,

(09:44):
which was the company that developed the Command and Conquer series,
which are real time strategy games. Um. I'm terrible at
real time strategy games. I'm just I can't. I don't.
I don't have a brain from either. I can't. I
can't manage. Yeah, I cannot manage the many assets. I
can't keep track of everything. Obviously, if I were going

(10:06):
up against Kirk and Spock, they would be able to
defeat me because I can't think three dimensionally. Um Also,
Electronic Arts formed a partnership with Square, being the Japanese
game company that's that's most famous for for RPGs like
say Final Fantasy. You might have heard of it. Um
and Uh, Square and and e A worked out this deal.

(10:27):
They formed a Square E A here in the States
and E A square over in Japan. Uh. The idea
of being to transfer titles that were happening in each
place to the other and and see see how they did,
you know, try to try to bring stuff that wasn't
being seen in each country over to the other, because
there were I think, especially in the Final Fantasy series,
if I'm not mistaken, there were a couple of entries

(10:50):
in the Final Fantasy Series that happened in Japan that
at that point had never been seen in the United States. Correct,
and uh, and and people were you know, RPGs had
a little bit of a following over here, but but
none of the really big cool titles were coming over
and so and so. So I meant that you had
to have like a Japanese game console, and then you
had to import the titles because of course, the the

(11:12):
media for the Japanese consoles would not work on the
United States. It literally would not play correct. I mean,
you know, aside from the fact that you would have
to learn Japanese in order to play them very effectively,
which is a whole other issue. But um, but yeah, so,
so each square E A and A square each had
a stake in the other um which which which is
an interesting fun business model. And uh in that same year,

(11:35):
they brought um Bashida Blade to Parasite Eve and Zeno
Gears all to the American market for the PlayStation. Huh wow,
so another big move on e A's part. Also kind
of interesting to see a an alliance in the video
game world. Uh. Some people would call that, uh frightening

(11:55):
because you know, when you're talking about being such a
big power player and you already have a reputation for
scooping up smaller companies and then to make an alliance
with another big company, just that starts to make other
people feel really nervous, kind of nervous. Yeah. Seven years
after e A had acquired Origin Systems, Richard Garriott, who

(12:16):
was the founder of Origin, leaves e A. He had
finished work on Ultimate nine, which was the final uh
entry into the Ultimate series besides the online stuff. And uh.
He also seems to feel very similar to the way
other people who departed e A felt that that it
was just it was not the most ideal creative environment, right.

(12:39):
Apparently a bunch of his former team members, of former
Ultimate team members felt very much the same way because
after e A canceled Ultimate Online to UM at the time,
a bunch of a bunch of them jumped ship to
go join Garriott at the new company that he had formed,
Destination Games. UH. Garriott would not see very much success
here in the United States over the next several years,

(13:01):
but recently interesting thing is that he had a kick
started campaign for a new game that is inspired by
his old Ultimate series, and the kickstarter funded in like
two days, it was, and then went on to meet
lots and lots of stretch goals. Anyway, back to e
a h. Still in they published their first Medal of

(13:22):
Honor game, which is again another one of those big
franchises that UH that they're very well known for, and
that debuted on the PlayStation platform. UH. And that same year,
Sega debuts a new video game console called the Dreamcastcast.
I own a Dreamcast. I like it a lot. I
actually got my Dreamcast after the Dreamcast had already run

(13:45):
its course and was no longer in production. UH. And
I inherited a lot of games from a friend of
mine who was not really playing them anymore. And you know,
I think Dreamcast it's another one of those things where
we've done an episode of about Sega. We did a
full thing about Sega's um Uh successes and it's it's
notable failures and it's interesting. Again. The Dreamcast was one

(14:07):
of those consoles that was phenomenal. It performed really well
potatoly if you stacked it up against its competitors, but
it just, you know, it just never never really caught on.
It never cut onto the to the extent that it
needed to in order for a viable platform. I think
it was a little bit niche for for the for
the mainstream American market real time especially um Also that

(14:29):
year was when Square e A put out the Final
Fantasy Anthology, which brought some of those games that had
not been published yet in America over here. So in
two thousand, that's when the SIMS debuts, and it is
a huge success, and it really gave e A a
access to a brand new audience, which we usually refer

(14:51):
to as women. It turned out, it turned out that
they didn't know at the time when they were producing
the SIMS. They had no idea that was going to
resonate with a female audience. And in fact, when they
were first building the SIMS, it was just going to
be a a way of building homes, and then they
created these little virtual characters to inhabit the homes and

(15:13):
realized that it was way more interesting to see what
the virtual characters were up to than to build out
the houses. So that's when the SIMS focus shifted to
these virtual people, and your job was to give them
as much of a life as you possibly could, which
became increasingly difficult than the game, where you're thinking, I
don't have enough time. That's just like real life. I

(15:34):
don't have enough hours to give this person a good
job and a and a satisfying social life. Still have
them go to the bathroom without having a terrible accident
in the middle of the living room. But uh, Anyway,
it was a huge performer, and they immediately started to
to develop expansion packs for the SIMS and also go
into development for the sequels to the SIMS because it

(15:57):
was clear they had touched the nerve and that It's
also the year and two thousand, that's when Sony launched
the PlayStation two. Yeah. Um. Meanwhile, back on the PlayStation one,
Square e A put out Crymno Cross that year, which
is my the only RPG that I've ever played all
the way through. I'm not really an RPG person. I
love that game with a burning and fiery passion. It

(16:19):
is it is the best. Um. But but I think
that it's interesting that, uh. I mean, although it had
been out already in Japan, I think it. You know,
they were like, no, that's PlayStation two. Whatever, this one's
fine on the PS It'll still sell really well. And
Sony was very good about supporting their old consoles even
when they're introducing a new one. PlayStation two games were

(16:42):
developed for the PlayStation two well after PlayStation three debuts.
So um, they have a very different strategy compared to
say Microsoft. And speaking of Microsoft, in two thousand one,
that's when Microsoft launched the Xbox. So now we have
even more competition in the video game console world. At
this point, e as just having kittens. Nintendo launched the GameCube,

(17:05):
and e starts developed games for all the three major
console platforms, which of course does not include Sad Trombone.
So Xbox, PlayStation two, and GameCube are all great platforms
for e A to develop for. They just they see
that as endless opportunity. So uh. They then that same

(17:27):
year closed the Bullfrog division of e A. Now this
this kind of brings us to another thing that people
have criticized EA for, not just the fact that they
bought up companies, but that they would later go on
to close them when they realized that they weren't performing
quite as well as they wanted. Yeah, they just the
things weren't working out. And a lot of the people
who worked for these divisions came out and said, well,

(17:48):
the reason things didn't work out is because they were
so adamant on us producing a brand and just concentrating
on that brand as opposed to letting us develop do
what we do, which is developed games. And so you
have this series of stories of all these different divisions
being or different companies rather being bought up and turned
into divisions for e A later getting closed. Um that

(18:11):
you know, some would say that all e A was
really doing was buying up competition and shutting it down.
You know that that ultimately that's what turned out to
be the case. Uh oh yeah. Whether or not it
was intentional is absolutely you know, that's that's that's completely
beside the point. It didn't matter if it was intentional
or not. That was the effect, right, So, uh, it
was it was kind of rough and around that same time,

(18:33):
e starts to make licensing agreements to make games based
on films and other properties. Uh. These included big name
properties like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Godfather,
and James Bond. I think that that fits in really
well with their strategy of of latching onto brands and
not necessarily producing the best games, because a lot of
those titles, especially in those early days, were not not playable.

(18:56):
I mean, and and that's that that goes back all
the way, you know, and any film title games kind
of spotty. There are a lot of times where I
feel like like companies rely very heavily on the name
of the franchise to sell copies, and so therefore the
amount of time and effort you need to go in
and build a very compelling game sometimes slips through the cracks.

(19:20):
So um, you know, in that case, you end up
getting these games that are based on these beloved franchises,
but they failed to really live up to gamer expectations.
This happens. I mean, you can spend hours naming all
the superhero games that just didn't live up to expectations.
Not you know, there are a few that have been phenomenal,
but they are way more that weren't so not a

(19:43):
problem that only e A possesses. Certainly, certainly not. Also
in two thousand and one, I should put in that
UM Square A put out Final Fantasy ten, So that
was that was one of those I remember seeing the
previews for Final Fantasy ten when that was coming out
and thinking that that looked like a put particularly beautiful
game at that time. But things have changed. It doesn't

(20:07):
Things that were once the most gorgeous thing you could
imagine have not necessarily aged. Well, do you have anything
for two thousand two, I do not excellent. Two thousand three,
e A shuts down Westwood Studios and moves all the
remaining stuff to EA's Los Angeles studio. The Westwood was
in Las Vegas, and so they shut that one down.
So there's another example. They did not keep everybody. They

(20:30):
laid off quite a few people, but the people who
did remain were then moved to Los Angeles. UH And
then two thousand four, wait, Lauren, I didn't see your
high sign. My bad. We have we have an intricate
system of hand signals going on in the background here.
I know. Two thousand three, UH Square decided UM their

(20:53):
their relationship with e A had been slightly degraded, and
also they had been UM flirting a little bit with
with Enix stud Deos over in Japan and UH and
so Square dissolved their relationship with e A, UM bought
back all of their shares and formed Square Enix, which
would continue to produce the rest of the series that
people that they were known for excellent, well, excellent for them,

(21:15):
not so great for e A necessarily. In two thousand four,
e A went ahead and dissolved the Origin Systems division,
so that was the ultimately the division that produced the
Ultimate Games. That one was formally no more as of
two thousand four. E A also acquired Criterion, which was
that was the company that had developed the Burnout games.

(21:37):
Anyone who's familiar with those the driving games that get
really super crazy, Yeah, I really love those games. I'm
not a big driving game kind of guy, but those
particularly are very arcady. Yeah, yeah, they're They're a little
bit less focused on the physicalities of driving, and so
if you're not a huge car buff, the Burnout series
is pretty fun because all the crashing parts some other

(21:59):
games don't let you do. The crashing parts are pretty
pretty spectacular and play a large part in most of
those games. Uh. And then there that was the same
year that someone on live journal who had the handle
e A Spouse posted a rather uh critical post about
e A saying that they had some draconian practices as

(22:22):
far as employment goes, that people were being forced to
work super long hours six days out of the week,
they weren't getting compensated for overtime. Um. There were a
lot of pretty ugly accusations, and eventually some uh, some
spouses and some employees of e A got together and

(22:44):
they filed a class action lawsuit, in fact, a few
class action lawsuits against e A, and that ended up
leading to massive changes in the A and in the
industry in general, because other companies saw what was happening
and they thought, we better fixed this before it happens
to so uh. In two thousand six, e A settled
a lawsuit that was brought against it by a bunch

(23:06):
of graphic artists and awarded the graphic artists fifteen point
six million dollars in unpaid overtime. And in two thousand seven,
the court awarded plaintiffs of a class action lawsuit fourteen
point nine million dollars and unpaid overtime. So this this
is a different group. It's not the same one twice.

(23:27):
So yeah, that was a big deal. And obviously e
A did not want to court any more problems down
the line, and so they started to really take a look.
Uh and in two thousand five, e A purchased jam
Debt Mobile. So two thousand five, this is before the
iPhone comes out. EA makes its first move into the

(23:50):
mobile gaming world for for phones, not not mobile devices
like game Boy or whatever. You know. It had been
developing games for platforms like that for a while, but
this was the first time it started to really look
into using um cell phones, not even smartphones yet as
a potential gaming platform. And uh, and that was a
smart move. I mean, we're seeing more and more that

(24:13):
mobile devices are making a huge impact on the gaming industry,
So that was a Whoever was the person who said
we should do this was really they were really looking ahead.
And that's also the year two thousand five would be
the year when Microsoft launched the Xbox three sixty. We'll
be right back with more on the electronic arts story,

(24:34):
but first let's take a quick break. Al right. So
let's see, I think, according to my notes, we left
off in two thousand five, So two thousand six, e
A acquires Mythic Entertainment. Mythic Entertainment was responsible for the RPG,

(24:55):
the m m O RPG Dark Age of Camelot that
they viewed back into thousand one, So now e A
has decided to acquire another m m O RPG. They
saw that as a way of of maintaining a steady
stream of revenue. You've got all these people who are subscribing,
so that was the strategy there, And that was the

(25:16):
year the e A also acquired Digital Illusions CE better
known as Dice and Dice is the company that made
Battlefield nineteen two. So two thousand six is also the
year that Sony launched the PlayStation three and and Nintendo
launched the week exactly, both of them one year behind
the Xbox three six, which had had a head start,

(25:37):
uh and uh, well not a full year, but several
months behind anyway. But also what I thought was interesting
was I found a statistic here from Bloomberg Business Week
that said it was an article that was published in
two thousand six. So that's why I put it here,
because we're talking about two thousand and six here. They
said that from nine until present day, which at that

(26:00):
time was two thousand six, e A averaged about one
point two acquisitions per year. It was buying up more
than a company per year if you average it out
over those years, and that one third of the companies
that had purchased in it eventually shut down. So that's
again showing that that kind of trend that I talked

(26:21):
about earlier, the criticism that people have laid against it, saying,
you're buying up these companies and when you are, uh,
and you stripped the industry of the talent these people have,
and then you end up closing it down when it
doesn't meet whatever your performance measurements are. Certainly not to
say that those people didn't go on to do other things,

(26:42):
but but yeah, yeah, but and it's not necessarily it's
not necessarily the good business model for anyone in the industry, right,
anyone else. And the big criticism would be those those
guys and those men and women could have been developing
games during that time that would have potentially changed the industry,
but they couldn't because they were under contract or part

(27:03):
part of this larger organization where they had nowhere else
to go At that point. Um, yeah, I mean it's
from from e A's perspective. It's doing all the smart
business moves. So they're from a gamer's perspective or an
industry analysts perspective. They might say this is not good
for the industry, or the gamer might say this isn't
good for me because I'm not getting great games out
of it. E A's point of view is that this

(27:24):
is I'm making money. Yeah, it's solidifying my position. Money.
Yeah yeah. Money is the a when you're a business
turns out. Yeah yeah. And I know this isn't financial stuff.
So I didn't mean to blow your mind's there about
how money is. Okay. So two thousand seven, e A
acquires BioWare. BioWare made some of my favorite games of

(27:47):
all times. Still does uh ballers Gate. I love the
Baller's Gate games, but the Kicking Phone just this, Um,
there's a fantastic character who has a little hamster and
he shouts out random things when you go into battle
with him, and it's endlessly entertaining. They also made Planescape Torment.
They made the Star Wars Nights the Old Republic Games

(28:09):
Co Tour, which, again I was a huge fan of
the Cotour Games. They made Mass Effect, which I've played
a little bit of. I never played it all the
way through, and Matt Frederick would probably hit me if
he were in the room, because it's actually his copy
of the game that I have and I haven't returned
it yet. Um. That year they also acquired Pandemic Studios,

(28:30):
which was the company that brought us Star Wars battle
Front and also the game Destroy All Humans, as well
as some other titles. And that was the year that
that Probst steps down as CEO. He had been CEO
since Hawkins had left the company. It was supposed to
be more temporary than that, wasn't it. I think I

(28:51):
believe so. But he had led the company throughout those years,
uh so from two thousand and seven and he's still
on the board, but he ends up stepping down and
John Richard Tello a Tillo I guess it should say
Richie Tello becomes the new CEO, and he says the
company is going to undergo a reorganization to address the

(29:15):
problems they've had where they've been acquiring and trying to
assimilate and then shutting down all these different companies that
they've been going after over the years. So, I mean
this is this is an issue that all big companies have.
If you acquire a company, there's always a culture shock
era that allows it because unless the two companies are

(29:36):
practically ideally well aligned, yeah, there's gonna be culture shock.
So sometimes a company does this so quickly that they
there's never that period that you need to adjust and
have things work out. So he was saying, let's take
the time to really look at how our company is
structured and make sure that it makes sense. That was
his That was his statement from the the get go

(30:00):
when he started right. Also unrelated to that, but in
addition to the other games that they published that year,
that was the year that they published harm Nix's Rock
Band along with MTV Huge huge title. I mean, you know,
Guitar Hero had been in the years before already kind
of uh had revolutionized the idea of rhythm games on consoles,

(30:22):
and Rock Band ended up taking that and dialing it
up to eleven. As spinel Tap would love to say,
and uh, I mean, I've had a blast playing Rock Band.
Even though I adore, I adore the series. It's terrific.
My musical talent is is pretty negligible, but I still,
you know, any game that makes you feel like a
rock star is pretty pretty cool. It is, it is,

(30:44):
And also karaoke in your own home is pretty cool.
And also a little cheat boxes that allow you to
hook up real electronic drum sets to the game and
actually rock out. It's pretty neat, pretty neat. Yeah. So
we then move on into two thousand eight, where e
A has a an attempt to acquire another big name,

(31:07):
Take two Interactive, which you know gamers will recognize that
it's it's pretty famous studio. So e A made a
move to acquire take to Take two turned down the
initial offer that e A made, and then, uh, the
negotiations kind of got a little quiet. But everyone kept

(31:29):
an eye on this because they were really wondering if
e A was in fact going to acquire yet another company,
and some people were really worried about what the fate
of Take two would be. Yeah. I think that part
of the reason that it fell through was also that
the the economic crisis that year, yeah hit them really hard. Yeah,
So e A's attempt to acquire Take two fails, and

(31:51):
that year the entire world entered into an economic crisis,
and it affected lots of industries, you know, Realist eight
being the big famous one in the United States banking
as well, but it also hit companies like e A
and uh e A end up announcing that was going
to cut more than a thousand positions across all of

(32:13):
its divisions, which ended up being around ten to eleven
of its workforce, and that the company lost over six
hundred million dollars in the last quarter of two thousand
eight due to accommodation of the economic crisis and just
the fact that it's game releases had not performed very
well in the market at all um and there their

(32:34):
stock took a big tumble. So in August fifte of
of two thousand eight, their stock was valued at forty
eight dollars and twenty four cents per share. By December
twenty six of two thousand eight, it had fallen to
twenty five dollars and thirty two cents per share, So, uh,
not not quite losing half its value, just under at drop,

(32:58):
but it's but a whole bunch, that's that's terrible, and
it really what it signaled was that investors had lost
a lot of confidence in the company. Now, keep in
mind the value of your company is based upon how
many stocks are out there. If you're a publicly traded company,
the value of your company, in part at least, is
determined by how many stocks you have, and how how

(33:19):
many stocks are out there in the market, and what
they're the actual value of each stock is. So you
kind of multiply those two numbers together and you get
a rough estimate of what the value of the company is. Well,
when you lose fifty percent of your stock price, that
means that your company is losing fifty of its value.
More or less oversimplifying, but that more or less is
what it means. Well, two thousand and eight wasn't all bad.

(33:43):
They did come out with a game that ended up
getting a lot of critical acclaim and a lot of fans,
which was Dead Space. I was never a big Dead
Space player, but I know some people who can recite
everything about that game, including all the little hidden stuff
that you had to find to get the backstory right right.
Also in the negative column that was two eight was

(34:03):
a year that they were hit with a class action
lawsuit over the undisclosed edition of Secure Rom DRM software,
along with games like Spore for the PC and and
the lawsuit was about the fact that they had included
this this this uh digital rights management software without telling
anyone about it, that it was separate from the game software,

(34:24):
and that it was basically impossible to uninstall, even after
you would uninstalled the video game. Yeah, so e A
was falling under the same trap that Sony did, where
in an effort to try and keep its intellectual property safe,
it had kind of over well, not kind of it overstepped. Yeah, yeah,
you know. The point was to prevent people from from

(34:44):
installing it more than I think it was eight times,
three times, six times a number of times, right, right, Well,
it's one of those things where, you know, someone who
buys the game, their argument is I should be able
to install this as many times as I want, because
you know, if I buy a new compute, it or
I want to be able to transfer the stuff I
own onto that computer. It's not that I'm you know,

(35:06):
installing it on all my friends machines. I just want
to be able to play my game. And the other
argument against that is that we don't want you to
install this on or your friends machines. Right uh. In
In other DRM news, that year, that was the year
that UM the e A announced plans to require PC
owners of things like Mass Effect and Sport to authenticate
their copies every ten days, even if they were playing

(35:28):
the game offline. Yeah. Um, and this this is this
becomes a common thread in e A as well, this
idea of having either a persistent Internet connection or at
least using the Internet every now and then to again
verify that you have a legitimate copy of the game.
So not only would you have to retain whatever the

(35:49):
disc was, you would have to have that in your machine.
You would have to then make a connection to the Internet,
and then the Internet would make sure that that, in
fact was your registered copy so that you could play
the game you wanted. Even if you were able to
just move everything on the game into your computer and
it's a single player game, you still had to do that.
And a lot of players objected. Yeah, yeah, especially you

(36:11):
know two thousand eight. You know, most people had had
pretty good Internet connections at that point. It was getting better,
but not everyone wanted to be connected to the Internet
all the time. And you know, the people who bought
the game pointed out that this was really a hassle
for the legitimate game player and people who were pirate
into the game, were breaking this encryption, They were using

(36:32):
keys that would allow them to right so that they
wouldn't they didn't have to authentic kate. They were playing
pirated copies that they got for free that didn't have
this DRM in it. And so the players, the legitimate
players who had bought the game say it, said, look,
you're only punshed us. You're not you're not stopping piracy,

(36:53):
and you're making the game a miserable experience for the
people who actually paid to play it. Yeah. This this
never did go into effect, this particular bit of of
d r M. On the A side, they relented pretty
quickly after community feedback, which was highly highly negative as
you can imagine. They however, did not learn their lesson
from it, because they would not they would incorporate it

(37:13):
again in the future. Two thousand nine, e A acquires
a play Fish, which was a developer of casual games.
They had seen how Louis was doing and they thought
let's get in on that as well. Um they also
went ahead and cut another fiftred employees, which was about
sevent of its workforce, and they shut down Pandemic Studios

(37:34):
that year. So get another example of them acquiring and
then shutting down a company. Uh, and next I don't
have anything for me neither. But inn in the summer
they acquired pop Cap Wow. Yeah, another casual games developer.
So lots of lots of mobile content all that. Yeah,
they're ones who owned like The Jeweled and stuff like that. Right.

(37:57):
They also released Star Wars the Old Republic Blake, which
was a Star Wars based m m O RPG. Uh. Now,
we had one person asked us if we could talk
more about Star Wars the Old Republic and why did
it move from a subscription based service too free to
play with micro transactions and and how you know, what's
the story of its failure if you want to look

(38:19):
at it in that way? All right, As so I
actually played Star Wars the Old Republic. I I subscribed.
I was one of the subscribers. I was one of
the people who got who rolled his eyes when I
heard that was going to free to play because I
had actually bought a I think I was like a
twelve month subscription in advance. But so Star Wars the

(38:40):
Old Republic takes place thousands of years before the events
of the Star Wars movie series, but it puts you
in either a a Sith role or a Republic role,
and you have different storylines that we play out based
upon the type of character you were playing. I think
part of the problem was that it, even though it

(39:02):
was an M M O RPG, more frequently than not
it felt to me like a single player game. It
felt like another sequel to Cotur, which isn't a bad thing.
The Coach War games were great. I very much enjoyed them,
even though the second co Tour game obviously had an
entire section that was left unfinished because you could see
it on your map, but you couldn't get to it

(39:23):
in uh in the actual game. Anyway, the Old Republic
felt like another sequel to that. It didn't feel as
much like an M M O RPG. You didn't have
as many people partying up together and the kind of
interactions that you would normally expect from and not after
the initial launched like there was a lot of interest
in it very early on, but that kind of dropped

(39:44):
off quickly, and part of the problem was that people
were completing the storylines for the characters very very quickly,
and once you did that, you didn't really have any
incentive to keep playing so it was just like if
you had played a single player game all the way
through and then you're thinking, all right, well that was fun,
but now I want to sell this game and get
some money back, and then I'm going to buy another
new game. That's kind of what people were thinking. Well,

(40:07):
subscribers started to drop off from this game, and e
A's response was that, well, you know, we could either
pull the plug on it entirely, or we could try
and switch our strategy and get more people interested in
this game. But obviously the subscription models not really working.
So what if we dropped the subscription and go to
free to play, and instead of making money through people subscribing,

(40:29):
we make money by selling items in the game for
real money, small amounts of money micro transactions. But um,
and you could still play it for free without buying anything,
but you wouldn't have access to the entire game. There'll
be sections of the game you could not get to
because you would have to purchase them in order to
have access. And all of the micro transaction items were

(40:53):
the super powerful cool things with rainbows and unicorns or
whatever the you know, Star Wars equivalent of rainbows in
the cub lights. So I realize you're not familiar with
the venerable franchise known as Star Wars. Yeah no, never
never seen any of those scruffy looking at um. So, yeah,
the that was the whole response there was to switch

(41:15):
order free to play and do micro transactions. Now, this
is another thing that e A has received a lot
of criticism for as the whole micro transaction approach. I
can't say the word criticism either, obviously, but the micro
transactions are that's another way to try and generate revenue,
and if you make your game free to play, it

(41:35):
may be the only way unless you incorporate lots of advertising,
and either way most players kind of react in a
negative way. Yeah, that has also been something that e
A has gotten a lot of flak for, is the
the inclusion of kind of kind of annoying out there
advertising in the middle of their games. Right. Well, the
disappointing performance of Star Wars may have also contributed to

(41:57):
another dip in e AS stock prices in twelve of although,
but before we move on, just thank you Chaz our
listener from Twitter for for writing in about that. Yes,
thank you very much, yea, And we have a few
more questions. We will address at the end of this
episode as well. Also in twenty eleven, something else big
happened to e A. E A had the honor is

(42:18):
the wrong word for it had had the unfortunate um
role as Lull's SEC final target. Lulls SEC being Laugh
Out Loud Security was kind of a an offshoot of Anonymous.
It was not necessarily related directly to Anonymous, but it

(42:39):
was a group of of hackers who decided that they
were going to cause as much trouble as possible really
for the main reason they wanted to do it was
to show that they could. And uh, boy, I bet
they're regretting that decision right now because as of the
recording of this podcast, Uh, four of them have been
sentenced to between a year and two years in very

(43:00):
US uh jails or juvenile facilities. Well, so, yikes, I
guess they weren't quite as Anonymous as they thought. Uh. Anyway,
they hit EA as their final target before disbanding, and
uh they ended up releasing the log in information of
thousands of people who were playing Battlefield Heroes. So uh

(43:22):
that was a big black eye. A had to reset
all that and send emails out to everybody saying you know,
it was compromised and you need to change passwords and
all that kind of stuff. Uh. In twelve he wins
another awful uh distinguishing feature. Here they were called they
they were named the worst company in America by the

(43:43):
Consumerist And this is a this is a thing that
that the consumers does every year. They've been doing it
for a while. They gave a Golden poo award. Yes
they do. It's a very distinguished Uh. Yeah. The way
it works is that they set it up like a
tournament bracket and they let people vote on which company
they think should progress in the bracket. And that year

(44:05):
e A took home the Golden Pooh. It's final opponent
was the Bank of America. Now keep in mind this
is all from reader votes, it's not I mean, I
think I think the consumers is the one that ultimately
decides which ones are in the brackets, but the readers
are the ones who determine which companies progress. Right, And
this is the Internet, and there are some gamers on
the Internet, so so I'm sure that that is part

(44:27):
of why e A made it that far. But but also,
I mean, was when occupy was happening, So so think
I mean there were thousands of people on the streets
protesting the actions of corporations like Bank of America, and
e A still still beat them out. Yeah, by I
think it was like close to to you know, twenty

(44:49):
six or something like that. It's really like that. So
it was it wasn't even close. It's a runaway. But again,
you know the platforms the internet. Gamers like the Internet,
so you know, keep that all in mind. It's kind
of it was kind of skewed to e A, is
what we're saying. We've got a bit more to say
about e A, and then I'll have a lot more
to say about e A in a follow up episode

(45:11):
right after this break. So why did it win Worst Company? Well,
some of the the suggestions were because it had stripped
the video game industry of talent through all those acquisitions
and then shutting down competitions. Are shutting down competing studios,

(45:33):
I should say. So they not only bought up competing
studios but then shut them down, which then meant that
that talent and those games would often become inaccessible. There'd
never be another one because e A would own the
intellectual property but not have anyone to actually develop the
games anymore, at least the people who had developed it
were gone, so it would be a completely different experience. Uh.

(45:55):
Then there was also sighting of the use of micro transactions,
just like I said, Uh, especially for any games where
you already had to buy a game and then on
top of it, have micro transactions within the things that
we're not free to begin with. Yeah, So the idea
of buying like a sixty dollar game and then having
to spend more money within the game in order for
it to be a satisfying experience that did not sit

(46:16):
well with a lot of people who voted in this. Also,
the one of the things they cited were the exclusivity
deals that e A had made with organizations like the NFL.
Now that's a big deal now for e A, and
made perfect sense. That meant that they had tied up
the NFL license that they were the only company that
could put out an official NFL affiliated football game, and

(46:38):
the same thing is true for other sports as well.
They made exclusivity agreements with other sports agencies, but NFL
is an easy example. So e A then shuts down
competition because no other game company can make an official
NFL licensed game. They can't use the actual team player

(46:58):
names or anything. And I'll you know, another football strategy
game could certainly be enjoyable. When you don't have that
brand recognition behind it, it becomes a lot harder to market, right.
I mean why if if you're a fan of football
and you want to play as your favorite football team
with you, with the actual players who are on that
team as your as your players, then you had to

(47:18):
go with the A because no one else had the
licensing agreement that would allow them to do that. And
so that, you know, people said, like, you're essentially saying
we're the only game in town. Yeah, you're you're further
further shutting down the opportunities of other studios. Right, So
that was another reason why they got a lot of votes.
Uh So the tournaments came out pretty badly for e A. Uh,

(47:42):
It's showed that that he had a real problem with
public perception of the company. UM and e A tried
to kind of uh respond to that, and and a
lot of people thought that their response was lackluster. This
would happen again, but we'll get to it. Yeah, I
don't want to spoil it, but yeah, year also was
when e A released Mass Effect three, which may also

(48:04):
have affected its standings as Worst Company in America because,
as I recall, there were a lot of people who
were not happy with the way that game ended. Yeah,
didn't they didn't they wasn't that the one that they
released a different ending to that you could you could download.
There were, as I recall, there were there may have been,
I think there might have been, but I know there
were at least three different endings that were already in

(48:24):
the game. But some people argued that the three different
endings were not distinct enough that you know, you would
have small details that were different, but that in the
grand scheme it felt like what you had done in
the series of games did Yeah, it defeats the entire
purpose of the Mass Effect series exactly. It felt like like, well,
while the whole game makes it feel like you're going

(48:44):
to have this huge impact, ultimately, if the differences aren't
that great, then it means that you know, what you
did didn't really matter in the grand scheme of things,
which from an existential point of view is kind of interesting.
But from a gamer player, uh, you know, experience, maybe
not so much far right right, it's not called nic
The game so therefore, so so people said that they

(49:05):
felt that the game had the end game in particular,
had been rushed, and that it just wasn't a fitting
capper to it. Uh and Penny Arcades been Kuchera, and
I apologize if I'm miss uh mispronouncing his name. He
criticized the company for concentrating on free to play games
and micro transactions, and he also said that the company

(49:25):
was failing to create compelling retail games. So you're saying
that the games that you are selling for sixty dollars
aren't really good good and the ones that are free
to play with micro transactions are irritating. Right. So penny Arcade,
by the way, has nine hundred and twenty two comics
that are tagged e A in their system, which as
of the recording of this podcast, yes as well, Yeah,

(49:47):
as of as of Tuesday, I think actually Tuesday or
Wednesday of this week, so they're there. There might have
been more uh since since then, but it just which
just goes to show that the gaming community has had
a lot to say and a lot of criticism to
lob against the company over the years. And UH and
in John Richard tell O stepped down as CEO and

(50:10):
as a member of the board. Uh. Here's a direct
quote from one of the blog posts that was written
that he wrote about this. He said, I am writing
with some tough news. I have resigned my position as
e AS CEO. I will be around for a couple
of weeks and I hope to have it at the
chance to say goodbye to many of you. Larry Probest
will be stepping in as executive chairman to help smooth

(50:31):
the transition. Uh. E A also continued to lay off
employees in part as a streamlining effort at this time.
And so Probest comes back in. You know, he had
stepped down and now he was interim CEO. Uh and
uh that's as of the recording of this podcast, that's
still the case. They hadn't found a permanent replacement yet. Yeah,

(50:53):
but they Yeah, that was That was another ten percent
of global staff that was laid off as of May
of this year. So tough times over at e A.
They also said that they planned to open a Dice
l A office uh where they would be developing games,
including Star Wars games, because they made a deal with Disney,
which of course acquired the rights to the Lucas Arts

(51:17):
stuff earlier, and they won the Worst Company in America
for the second year in a row. And most of
the reasons this is the first time that any company
has ever done this, by the way, done a tow
for and they they the reasons are pretty much the
same as But also there was another controversy that happened

(51:38):
between those two times that ended up costing the company
big time, which was the launch of sim City five,
one of the most anticipated games in a long time.
I mean, like there's certain titles that when you hear
about them coming out, people old school gamers get really excited.
Diablo three is a great example of a game that
got a lot of people talking months before it amount.

(52:00):
Sim City five is another one of those where people
who are fans of the sim City franchise were really
excited by this game. But the big issue was that
sim City five was a game that requires you to
have a persistent connection to the Internet in order to
play it. Even if you're just playing single player offline,
it's just you and your computer, but you still have
to have a persistent Internet connection, and they had some

(52:23):
server issues when the game launched, which meant that people
couldn't play the game they had just bought, they had
spent the money, the game was in their hands, they
wanted to play a single player game, and they couldn't
do it because the servers weren't working. Now, that tells
you that this is a huge problem. That that's another
example of why the persistent internet connection thing is an

(52:44):
argument that people say makes for bad gaming experience, because
when you have a technical issue on the game providers end,
then it's adding a completely unnecessary extra step that a
lot of things can go wrong with, right, And if
it's an online game, than that's just the way that works, right.
But when it's a single player game, then people have

(53:05):
a real hard time feeling it's infuriating and uh, you
know again, a lot of people say that the whole
reason for this was just so that e A could
have another kind of DRM there that you know, that's
not e A has denied that. They said that's not
the reason, but that's the reason everyone says, says is
a lot of people suggest that's the real reason. Let

(53:27):
me put it that way. Sure. They also made headlines
in February and March when UM the CFO Blake Jorgensen
announced that all future titles would involve micro transactions. Uh.
He backpedaled really hard a week later. Um let it.
That did not get a great reaction, and again that's
probably what contributed to it winning the Worst company in
America again. Yeah, despite all of this, their their stock

(53:49):
has been rising dramatically over the course of so far.
Um and uh really really interestingly, as of as of
this week, the a couple of the really high level
people have been selling off a lot of their shares
in their own company's stock, like fifty seven thousand of
their shares. Wow. That is Uh. I'm actually looking it

(54:13):
up right now because it's actually a little lower than
it was when I wrote it down. Because originally we
were going to record this episode the day before. We're
actually recording it right We're gonna record it yesterday. This
doesn't mean but on May fifteenth, fifteenth, the stock price
was at twenty two dollars and fifty cents when I
looked at originally right now on May sixteenth, at four

(54:35):
forty four pm Eastern time, more information than you need
to know, it's at two and two cents. So it's
dropped almost fifty cents, right around fifty cents since I
checked it yesterday. So it's still and it's obviously not
at that pre August two eight high when it was
in the high forties and lower fifties, but it's but

(54:56):
it's dropped a great deal since then. Um I think
I think that that well, as of as of Wednesday,
as of the May fifteenth, anyway, shares where shares were
up very nearly for the course. Yeah, so it's it's
I think volatile is a safe word to use. Yes, Yes,
that that's There's a lot of very very important financial

(55:18):
publications that are talking about e A right now, which
I which I always find fascinating, and and all of
them are going like, be cautious, don't actually invest, we
don't know about this thing. Yeah, there does seem to
be a real problem with consumer confidence in an investor
confidence in a e A. And again that can really
affect that. You know, e A is a multibillion dollar
industry company right now. It's you know, it's revenues can

(55:41):
be over a billion dollars, can be over three billion
dollars in a good year, and so when you're talking
about that, it's kind of weird to think that it's
it's value as a company is in question. That suggests
that there's been some pretty serious missteps or that something's
really funky with the industry in general, right right, well,
you know it's I think it's just basically that thing
where they're not really they're not really heating all of

(56:03):
all of this this feedback that they're getting from from
all of their their from their fans, and that's you know,
like and they also just renew their license with with
them the Football Association with a FIFA FIFA and the
soccer soccer So yeah, sure, football whatever go back to
France until um so and and FIVA is one of

(56:29):
those titles that consistently does really well for e A. Sure,
and and you know again like it's it's understandable why
would they would want that exclusivity? Now, we asked our
listeners if they had any specific questions they would like
us to address, and uh, we We've talked about some
of them already, so I'm not going to go over
all of them, but I've got two left that we

(56:50):
can chat about really quickly. Peter from Facebook said, what
was the most popular e A game? And if you
go from the debut of e A till present day
and you look at all the units sold. The SIMS
comes out on top with a level eleven point twenty
three million units sold globally according to VG Charts, and

(57:10):
second place would go to Need for Speed Underground. Now
that that doesn't surprise me, because the SIMS is one
of those games that had a very wide appeal. I
mean I loved it when it came out. I thought
this was such a cool innovative game. Also, I thought
it was funny to lock people out of the bathroom. Um, yeah,
I did some pretty cruel things. A good good thing

(57:30):
to know about you, Jonathan, That's great, that's why. Uh.
And then Ian he asked also on Facebook if I
could give a rundown of some of the PR meltdowns
the e A has had. I could, but that's a
full episode. So I'm going to give you, Um, I'm
gonna give you three examples of PR attempts that e

(57:52):
A maybe did not handle very well. This isn't just
like coming out and saying, uh, we didn't do this right,
We're going to do better. This is this is, this
goes beyond this. This comes into marketing mistakes. Okay, three
big marketing mistakes. Keep in mind that this might not
be entirely EA's fault. They could have partnered with a

(58:13):
marketing firm that came up with a terrible idea and
he just ran with it. Um One of them was
when e A was marketing the game Dante's Inferno, right,
remember that, yeah, which had all these different characters that
were based off the Seven Deadly Sins. So the promotion
for the Sin of Lust came around and right around

(58:36):
the same time as Comic Con An e A had
a booth at Comic Con where they had some young
ladies dressed in costume models colloquially known as booth babes
to promote their games, and they had their Sin to
Win campaign, which was a contest that encouraged people to

(59:01):
quote commit acts of lust unquote with costumed reps at
e A's booth. Later on, the team clarified this as
saying that they were just trying to tell people to
take photos with these reps and then tweet and share
them in various ways. But no, that doesn't sound like

(59:22):
that thing like, yeah, I'm I I remember I had
completely blocked that from my memory, but I remember exactly
how offended I was by that, because it was really offended. Actually, yeah, yeah,
not a great move. Okay, So here's another one. This one,
this one really makes me scratch my head. So there

(59:43):
for a promotional campaign for the game Mercenaries to E
a converted a London gas station to make it look
like a military depot, so it was like a depot
that you would see in the game Mercenaries to which
is kind of cool. I mean, we've seen promotions like that,
like the The Simpsons, Quickie mark type stuff. They had

(01:00:04):
a bunch of a bunch of life size column dolls
on London Underground for a while, that clever stuff. So
what's the big deal about converting a gas station into
a military depot. Well, they had this campaign where anyone
stopping at the military depot slash gas station would get
seventy dollars worth of gas for free. Keep in mind

(01:00:27):
that the game doesn't cost that much, which meant that
even if every single person who stopped at that gas
station then went out and bought a copy of Mercenaries
to still be losing money. You still are losing money.
And they ended up screwing up traffic patterns so badly
in London once people found out they could get free
gas at this station that it caused a massive traffic

(01:00:50):
snarl and even ended up with government censure of e A.
Cost him about fifty dollars to convert the gas station
into a military depot. Seventy bucks of gas per person
who stopped. Yeah, not the most effective use of your
marketing dollars, you might argue. And here's the third one.
So godfather to the game coming out and e A,

(01:01:14):
like many companies, tries to court the gaming press by
sending out publicity kits. They have various little gifts in them. Right,
horses head No, no horses had, no fish, okay, no connoli.
Brass knuckles. They send out brass, actual brass knuckles, actual
bras knuckles, which, by the way, not legal and also

(01:01:37):
illegal to send by may. So then they had to
send a message to everyone they had sent a package
to saying could you please send back those brass knuckles
and please don't sue us. Three examples of marketing failures
on e A's part. Now, there are plenty of other
examples of e A coming out and apologizing or not

(01:01:57):
apologizing for something, like when they won the America's Worst
Company the second time. There was a blog post that
essentially said we can do better, but a lot of
people viewed it as kind of a backhanded slap at gamers,
and not not like so much as owning up to problems,
but rather saying, uh, you know, people perceive it as this,

(01:02:18):
so we can change their perception. So uh and I'm
paraphrasing obviously, sure, but but nonetheless it no, they they've
they've not always had the best attitude about that sort
of thing, or at least that seems to be the
implication anyway, you know, because we're all reading this through
our own lens, and perhaps the way they intended it
and the way that we're interpreting it are just wildly different. Oh. Absolutely,

(01:02:39):
And you know, and it's an understanding, understandably upsetting situation
to be in um to to have to be the
company's representative coming off of something like that. Yeah, there's
there's ever you know, it's you know that that's the
kind of thing that if if I had to write that,
I would draft it like nine and a half times
and get everyone in the office to read it and
make sure there was absolutely no way that it could
be perceived as being negative to the fans that I

(01:03:01):
had piste off. So much to begin with. Yeah, that's fair,
and that wraps up this classic episode of text Stuff.
Almost forgot the name of my own show, The Electronic
Arts Story Part two, As I said, I'll have to
do another part. I might even just go and do
a full redo of the story from beginning to end,
because I do a much deeper dive these days than

(01:03:23):
I did back in those days. So if you guys
would like me to do that, If you have suggestions
for other topics, maybe there's another company or technology or
a trend or something you would love me to cover
on tech Stuff, reach out to me. The handle both
at Facebook and on Twitter is tech Stuff hs W
and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff

(01:03:49):
is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from
my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Three