May 29, 2020 • 46 mins
Who is the founder of Electronic Arts? What was the company's philosophy about making games? Why did the founder leave the company? Tune in to learn more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to text 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 a love all things tech, and it is time
for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode originally published
(00:25):
on May two thousand thirteen. It is part one of
a two parter and it is called The Electronic Arts Story.
This is clearly one that I'm going to have to
do an update for a lot has happened in seven years,
and there's a lot more to say about e A.
But we have to have a start somewhere, right, So
let's go back and listen to the Electronic Arts Story,
(00:47):
Part one. This particular story is pretty interesting. We're specifically
talking about Electronic Arts or e A, which a lot
of people view these days as some sort of megalomaniacal
corporation on dominating the entire video game industry. Yeah, and
it's uh yeah, well, I mean, well we'll get into
it later on, but but it but it is one
worst company in America twice, two years in a row,
(01:10):
two years in a row. Yeah. Yeah, But but to
start off, you know, it's it didn't start off as
this UH company that was bent on on having a
stranglehold on the video game industry. And I'm not saying
that that's what he has now or that's goal, that's
what's goal is, but that's what that's the popular perception
that is. Well, you know, to be fair, it does
as twenty five million registered players and is operating out
(01:34):
of seventy five countries, so it's not doing too shadows company.
But but it had had interesting beginnings. Now to really
understand how A started, you actually have to go way
back before e A was a thing. Uh. And my
first date that I wrote down was in nineteen fifty
three because that's when William M. Trip Hawkins the third
(01:56):
was born. Now, this guy is going to be the
founder of EA when we get up to that point,
but um, he was. It was his idea to start
up a video game company and UH. And you know
the way he came about this was as he was
growing up and going to school, he started to get
really interested in uh, computers in general and games as well.
(02:20):
In fact, in nineteen seventy he designed a board game.
It was a football board game called ACU stat Pro Football. Yeah,
he borrowed five thousand dollars from his father to get
this off the ground. And it was a complete commercial failure. Right.
It was his first entrepreneurial attempt and it and it failed,
which often we can learn a lot more from our
(02:42):
failures than our successes. But it teaches us a couple
of things about Hawkins. That he's interested in games, and
he's interested in football in particular, which becomes extremely evident.
And during the evolution of e A right, right, and
he had started kind of designing stuff. He was a
big D and D player from I understand, and and
was really interested in how all of the math and
(03:03):
statistics worked. But noticed that a lot of his friends
were not interested in doing that at all, and so
he was kind of thinking like, hey, what if. Yeah,
he was looking at at different ways of creating sets
of rules and statistics. And and also at the same time,
he was starting to get interested in computers. Now in
the early seventies, this is predating the personal computer. If
(03:25):
you were interested in computers, it's because you had a
job that there were computers at your job, or maybe
you were attending university and they were computers there right
right in in seventy when he had his first interaction
ever with a prototype a micro computer. This was over
at a friend's house and uh, and that kind of
set him up for a couple of years later. Yeah,
in nineteen seventy three, he has access to a d
(03:46):
E C PDP eleven mini computer and he creates a
program written in the Basic programming language that was designed
to run simulations of football games. So not exactly a
fully interactive gaming experience. It's more like, if I put
in every player's stats and then set this to go
and have it play out as if it were a game,
(04:08):
what would the results be? And he tested it by
running a simulation of what was going to be at
that time, the nineteen seventy four Super Bowl game, and
it turned out that his his game ended up predicting
the final score fairly closely. In his game, it said
that the Dolphins would win over Minnesota twenty three to six,
(04:30):
and the real score was actually twenty four to seven,
So at least in that sense, the statistics seemed to
hold true. Now, of course, we all know that in reality,
from a day to day basis, statistics can give you
an indication of how things might go, but there's no
guarantee that's how they will go, right. Yeah, So so
(04:50):
Luck could have certainly been involved in that one, but
you know not. Nonetheless, he was a student at Harvard
at the time. He graduated with a self designed major
in strategy and applied game theory. That's an interesting major
right there, especially fore right, so he says that he
spent a couple of years convincing Harvard to to let
him get that degree because that was what he wanted.
(05:12):
And I would go on to get an MBA from Stanford. Yep.
And when he graduated in nineteen with that NBA, he
went to work for a little company called Apple. And
at that time it really was a little company. Yeah,
they had just just about fifty employees at the time. Yeah,
fifty employees. He had joined early on. This is, of course,
you know, right at the very onset of the personal
(05:33):
computer era. The Apple two was the first computer from
Apple to really hit it off in the market. The
first Apple was mostly adopted by people who were hobbyists
or really had a fascination with computers, but it was
not a commercial success. What didn't run away with the market,
Apple two was a totally different story. That was the
one that a larger niche began to get interested in
(05:56):
personal computers. It still was still you know, kind of
in the hobbyist air, rah, but it was a looser
definition of hobbyists at that point, not just people who
were obsessed with computers. And I mean that in the
nicest way. I come from a family that's part of
this niche. So yeah, Hawkins has said that in seven
he saw an Apple two at a computer fair and
(06:18):
realized that this was kind of you know, he had
been churning around this, this concept of of games and
computers and programming for a couple of years and decided
that Apple was, yes, the way to go. He's not
the only one either. There were a lot of early
game developers who were looking at personal computers as the
platform of choice, and many of them, uh showed an
(06:39):
early preference for the Apple to Richard Garriott of Origin
also had that same fascination. So Hawkins works for Apple.
By two, he was the director of strategy and marketing
at Apple Computers. So from yeah, that those humble beginnings,
and of course by then Apple was doing very very
well and had already at its initial public offering, which
(07:02):
netted Hawkins quite a bit of money and so he
made a big, risky decision. He decided that his fascination
of games and computers needed to really be indulged, and
so he left Apple Computer. Well, he supposedly had had
decided almost a decade prior that in two would be
(07:23):
the year for him to start a business, to start
a computer business, and that that that would be the
year that that the home computing market had caught up
to his desire to plan it. Now, now, I both
of us honestly don't know whether or not that's truly
what he thought that some of the stuff, some of
the stuff he says, he says, well, after the time rights,
(07:44):
it could be retcond is all I'm saying. I'm not
saying he definitely did do that. I'm just I have
a little bit of skepticism either either way. On two
fun fact, the day before I was born, Um, in
case any he needed to feel really old. Right now,
thank you, La, You're welcome. Um, he he incorporated Electronic
(08:06):
Arts and And this was not going to This was
not the original name that he had thought of for
the company. No, No, he actually originally wanted to call
it Amazing Software, but that just didn't seem to really click.
He got a bunch of people together to try and
uh brainstorm and idea. He had actually used two thousand
dollars of his own money to fund this early part
(08:28):
of the company, UH, and he they started thinking about
other possible names. One of the names they came up
with was soft Art, but the head of another company
that was called Software Software Arts asked him if he
would reconsider naming his company that just to avoid any confusion,
and he agreed to do that. Had another brainstorming session
and that came up with Electronic Arts. Along with a
(08:49):
team of other folks and marketing people as well an
outside marketing company, and Electronic Arts was born. They would
actually receive by the end of nine two two million
dollars in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, and Sequoia Capital
even gave them some office space to work out of
before they had any sort of physical headquarters, right right,
(09:09):
very originally, I think he worked out of his own
home when he was hiring his first couple of people,
and UH, all of these people that he was hiring
at the time, and the naming of the company kind
of came about because he really wanted, um, he really
believed that computer games are an art form and wanted
UM wanted the game company to operate kind of like
(09:29):
a music label. UM. And this is really evident in
some of their early marketing campaigns and attempts. You know,
they would get these game developers together and pose them
like rock stars have, have rock music photographers come in
and do these gorgeous photographs of them and and really
concentrate on the software artist. Yeah, even the art they
would use in their the games they sold, which in
(09:50):
those days, games didn't come in boxes yet. They were
in usually plastic bags, and you had some art that
would be included. But it it looked pretty look like
a lot of Yeah, it look like a lot of
these games came out of someone's garage. And here's here's
a fun fact. A lot of them did. UM but
uh e A. They took an approach where they really
(10:11):
put a lot of graphic design work into the art
that was included with the games. And there were several
sources I read that likened the the art on the
games to album you would see on what we used
to you know, buy music on, which were these giant
vinyl albums. I actually kids are doing that again now,
(10:32):
but bund there was a while where I would say
vinyl album and I just get that blank stare um.
Those days appeared to have disappeared again for at least
a while, but I'll see that keeps up. They actually
moved to the headquarters in San Mateo, California, and they
were there for quite a few years. Ultimately they ended
up moving again. But and also you know, e A
(10:55):
expanded greatly, But we'll get into all of that. So
they're early early efforts were concentrated on a few titles, uh,
and they wanted to produce all of their games internally.
They wanted to be a publisher, a developer, and a distributor.
So these are all different parts of the video game industry.
(11:18):
And you can have a company that's just one of
these things, or you can have a company that does
multiple roles here. But to break it down, essentially, you
have publishers that these are the companies that fund the
development of video games. Now, they might have a development
team within the publisher, or they may pay an independent
developer to create a game, but they are the ones
(11:39):
who say, here's some money, we believe in the project
that you have pitched, why don't you go ahead and
build that game. Then you give us the game, and
we will make sure the game gets to distributors, who
will then make sure the game gets two stores. And
then the way it generally works if if you're talking
about an independent developer and a publisher, the publisher will
give an advance to the developer, and that advance is
(12:02):
against any future royalties that the game sells until you
pay off that advance, and then you usually have some
sort of royalty sharing program where the publisher gets a
certain amount of the money from sales and the developer
gets another you know, a percentage of those sales as well,
but the advance has to be paid off first because
that's the initial investment the publisher makes to the developer.
(12:24):
Developers are of course, those are the people who developed
the games, are the ones who actually build the games.
So again, it can be an independent company, it could
be part of a publisher, it could be part of
a distributor. Uh, either are all different types of models
out there, but these are the people actually building the code,
making the art, writing the games. That's that's yeah. Then
you've got the distributors. Now, these are the people who
(12:46):
are responsible for delivering finished games from publishers and delivering
them to retail establishments and other outlets, so they sell gain.
The publishers sell their games to distributors, and then the
distributors take those games and sell them to the retail
operators who then sell them to the public. So e
A was all three of these things right. And at
(13:07):
the time, Hawkins has said that he had done a
lot of market research and that a hundred and thirty
five of his competitors were doing the same thing um
which which seems like an awfully large number, although at
the time we were just on the verge of a
little bit of a market crash a little bit, a
little bit as a little bit is understating it. Yeah,
(13:28):
but but but but during this boom there were there
was a lot going on um and And also the
concept reminds me a lot of Apple's Apple is a
really terrific example of vertical integration and um and from
his time at Apple, I feel like probably that's one
of the places where he picked up this concept. We'll
be back to talk more about e A in just
(13:49):
a moment, but first let's take a quick break. The
first six titles from e A included games called Hard
Hat mac which was kind of like a Mario clone.
Um it's or Donkey Kong clone. I really should say
(14:12):
not Mario, but a Donkey Kong clone. It was a
platforming game a side not even a side scralling. It
was you know, it's kind of like Donkey Kong. Then
you had the pinball construction set. There was a game
called which you don't let you build pinball systems. Then
you had arcn which was kind of a weird fantasy
strategy game that was part chess, part action game. The
(14:36):
idea being that you have two sides. Uh. Two sides
have different pieces that are kind of like chess pieces.
The different pieces have different abilities, and you try to
take over your opponent's territory. Whenever one of your pieces
comes in contact with an opponent's piece, you then have
a little arcade like battle between the two. Right and
depending upon what your pieces, you might be able to
(14:58):
really whoop up on your opponent because you're faster or
your shots do a lot more damage. Uh and and
so it was all about strategy, like I want to
make sure this piece goes up against my that piece
my opponent has, so I can I can win the game.
You can kind of tell that I played the heck
out of this game. By the way, I also owned
the Pinball Construction set and I owned hard Hat Mac.
(15:21):
Then there was a Mule, which was another strategy game.
A lot of people who enjoyed this really like things
like a war gaming where you would have the big
table with all the hexagons, we move the pieces around.
Mule was kind of the computer version of that. Yeah,
it was really built for four players, which at the
time was was kind of unheard of. Yeah, and I
(15:43):
never got into it because my brain does not work
that way. I can I can do well enough in
our con because even if my strategy skills aren't that great,
my twitch skills were good enough to help me get by,
but Mule not so much. Then there was Worms, which
was kind of a high concept game where you would
train these what they called worms, these these these lines
(16:03):
of light to behave in a certain way in order
to progress in the game. And it's very difficult to explain.
And I've always seen people who say, if you want
to play the game, if you want to try it out,
find a copy of it and give it a whirl.
I mean, you can find stuff like this on the internet. Uh,
you should do it without reading the instructions, just to
(16:24):
see if you can figure out what the heck is
going on. Um. And I mean I read a description
of this, and I'm not sure I would be able
to figure it out. But maybe it's more intuitive than
the descriptions would give you. Uh that then the description
seemed to indicate. And then the last of the six
titles that they launched with when the company was first
(16:44):
offering up games was Murder on These zinder Kneuf, which
I know nothing about. I did not own that one. Yeah,
I I should put in that I have played zero
of these games. Well, they you know, right around when
you were one, so I'm not surprised. So but I
had most of these games because they came out for
the Apple too, and we had an Apple too. And
(17:08):
actually what happened was a local school had purchased a
bunch of games and then they gave them to me
to test and tell them which ones were educational and
which ones were not really educational. So I did, and
then I returned all the games and they said, all right,
you can keep all the ones that aren't educational. Yeah,
So as a kid, I was like ching and um,
(17:29):
and so yeah, I ended up with a lot of
a lot of early games. That's also how I ended
up learning about the Ultimate series because Ultimate two was
one of those games. But uh yeah, so there was
that was the initial launching title, but there were some
other ones that came out shortly thereafter. There was The
Last Gladiator, which is a game I also owned. Um
(17:52):
that that one didn't come in the batch. I won
that one as a as a part of a lip
syncing contest. What pray tell, were you lip sinking? Me
and my dad did a lip sinking routine to raise
Stevens the Pirates song, which is all about a pirate
who wants to sing and dance and wear bright shiny pants.
(18:15):
Well that's that's a that's awesome. Yeah. We won first place,
which was a fifty dollar gift certificate to a local
comics store. And I don't read comic books, so I
bought all their computer games instead, and one of them
was The Last Gladiator, And that was a game where
you play as a little gladiator and all these different
monsters come out and based upon whatever weapon you have
at your disposal, you have uh you know, decent chances
(18:38):
against them. It gets more and more difficult as the
game goes on. You know, it's kind of a typical
Arcady experience. Um. They also had they launched a game
that would end up being sort of the genesis of
e A sports. Dr J and Larry Bird Go one
on one. I'm told this is from a sport called
basketball and so on. That's one with the orange round thing. Correct, Uh,
(19:01):
I want to say yes, yeah, this this was one
of the earliest. Uh well, it was the earliest sports
game from e A and Hawkins really struck on a
brilliant idea. He had decided to try and approach people
who were famous in various sports and to license their
their names to get that media tie in. Yeah right, Yeah,
(19:22):
they get a promotional tie in from famous famous athletes,
I mean Dr J and Larry Bird or especially at
the world famous and and which is interesting because the
world famous since they were playing an American sport that
was almost exclusively played in America. Um. They ended up
that they ended up paying off big time and being
(19:44):
a strategy that e A still to this day employees.
They also established a new policy which was to in
order to keep more of the profits that it would
get from its uh from the sales it was going
to reduce the discount it gave software distributor sports games,
meaning that uh, they were essentially selling their games at
(20:05):
a higher cost. Two stores saying all right, well, you know,
we're no longer going to sell this game to you
at ten dollars a copy. We're gonna sell it to
you for thirty dollars a copy. And uh, and you
know it's your truck. Uh, it's your problem to figure
out how to sell this. So if you're if you
usually sell your games at forty dollars, now you're paying
(20:26):
thirty bucks to sell it for forty, your profit margin
has shrunk as a software disc a software retail store. Um,
you know, do you continue trying to do that? Do
you hike your prices up and hope that people are
willing to pay it? Uh. E A's point was that, hey,
we're starting to make a name for ourselves. People know
our product and they like it. So if if they
(20:46):
like it and this is the only way they can
get it, then you're gonna have to play ball with us.
And this is sort of the first example of e
A really throwing its weight around. Yeah. This was also
the year that it made its conference debut at the
Consumer Electronics Show, and so, yeah, they were really really
getting out there in the public and starting to make
make waves. Yeah, and keep in mind this is all
(21:08):
in the first year that they're actually offering games. You know,
they had been a company for a while, but of course,
you know, as soon as they became a company, it
didn't mean that they had games to offer everybody them. Uh.
They also had established these ideas that you know, every
single person who worked on the game was going to
be credited. If you were the creator of a game,
your name was front and center on the game's screens.
(21:32):
It would let you know that this was a game
developed by so and so. And that was a response
to a lot of the the activity they were seeing
on the console market, particularly with Atari. Uh, and that
there were people who were essentially anonymous game developers who
had put in hours and hours and hours of time
to create video games, but there was no sign of
(21:54):
credit for them on on the actual video games. It
was just you know, is this is you ex title
from X company? Sure. Yeah. The word that I've seen
tossed around in a lot of articles about it is
is surfs that these people were being treated like surfs
and and Hawkins was was saying that you know, some
(22:15):
of these kids that he had met out at Apple
were were and I quote legitimate divas, and and that
they deserved better than that. Yeah, and they Let's make
it clear, e A was not the only company doing this.
There were other companies that split off from Atari, for example,
that were founded by developers who wanted to have more
(22:36):
more control and more credit for the work that they
were doing. So e A is one example of that,
but it's by no means the only example of that.
Now UH in four Larry Probst joined the company as
the vice president of sales, and he will become really
important to e A. He was already important at that point,
(22:56):
but becomes even more so over the years. UH and
e A begins to distribute games from other companies, not
just their own companies. So now they're becoming a distributor
for other UH publishers. And one of the first ones
was Lucasfilm Games. There was also s s I and Interplay.
They all used Electronic Arts as a distributor. So now
(23:18):
they're bringing in money not only from the games that
they are developing in their their own house, but also
from developers. Yeah, this was this was the year that
the that the video game market really crashed or was
really feeling all of the effects of the crash. Um.
And this was due to a lot of a lot
of things, but um, but but mostly you know, Atari
(23:39):
had been kind of sort of driving the market into
the ground for a minute. Yeah, yeah, the market was
completely flooded with games, and and not good games necessarily.
There were some there's some great titles that were among
the ones that came out that year, but there were
Atari had essentially lowered the bar so far for anyone
(23:59):
to submit games to the console that it was flooded
with games that were just rushed, that had bad art,
that were poorly constructed, that were impossible to play. Um.
And this made people stop wanting to buy games because
they were just not fun. Right. And also there were
so many consoles on the market, you know, it had
(24:21):
kind of boomed, and and these things cost four to
eight hundred dollars in today's in today's concept of the dollar, right,
and so you know, yeah, it was it was not
sustainable at the time without the quality of games that
were coming out, and there was such an early boom
that it was just a rush, right, and then the
rush was followed by a bubble bursting, which we see
all the time, not just in technology but in all
(24:43):
kinds of markets. And uh and so you know, as
of a game company, Electronic Arts had a tough year
ahead of it because you know that was it was
affected to it. Even though a lot of its games
were being made for specters. I was saying p seas
but really at this time we weren't really calling the
PCs yet, but yeah, they were being made for computers.
(25:05):
It still was affected because uh, you know, a lot
of consumers got jaded on the concept of games in
the first place. That was, however, the year that they
published a game called The Seven Cities of Gold, which
I also owned. Uh yeah, I was. I was known
for being a terrible, terrible columnists colonialist. I guess I
should say I would go in and wreak havoc on
(25:27):
the various Mayan and az tech cultures and plunder them. Yeah.
I've heard that it was a very educational game, edutainment
edutainment toll. Yeah. I want to say that I bought
that one, and that one was not part of the package,
because if it were part of the package. Then obviously
I fipped about it being educational. Um. And then e
A began to switch its strategy at this point, when
(25:50):
the video game market had crashed, and instead of marketing
games as being from specific creators the way they had
been where they had made these developers rock stars, uh,
they were instead going to look at creating actual brands
and genres. So instead of saying from the mind of
so and so, they said, why don't we find a
game that really resonates with people and then just continue
(26:13):
to create games within that brand title or more even
just within that type of gameplay. Uh. This would actually
end up being something that people would criticize e A
four years later to the point where they well, they've
they've taken it to something of an extreme, but we'll
get into that. Yeah, Like yes, and they also decided
to start making games for lots of different platforms. So
(26:36):
besides the Apple two, they started looking at the Macintosh,
which was brand new in uh, the Amiga, the Commodore
sixty four IBM compatibles, which were just starting to take
off right around then. Uh, the Atari eight hundred, and
the Attari st We've got a bit more to say
about electronic arts. But first, let's take another quick break.
(27:05):
All right, we're back, and let's go back into what's
going on with the e A. So comes round and
e A starts releasing a bunch of games, including some
that were really famous in the fantasy gaming genre. Uh,
the big one being The Bard's Tale, which I also owned.
(27:25):
I did, I did not? I think. Well, it was
very Dungeons and Dragons ish. You would control a party
of players. You would you would generate characters and then
put them together in a party, and uh, this was
kind of standard for a lot of other video games
at the time. Wizardry was very similar in this respect,
where you would have certain number of fighters, a certain
(27:48):
number of magic users, maybe a thief or even a
bard who could affect the way the party performed by
playing different songs. That was one of the big innovative
gameplay elements of The Bard's Tale. So you know, play
a little song and then everyone gets gets all amped
up and they fight better, or you play another song
and everyone's starting to feel kind of chill and they
start healing and faster. That's terrific, useful bards, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah,
(28:12):
as opposed to and uh, there's this guy Guy's singing again.
We can't get them to shut up. We've broken four
loots and he doesn't get the hint. Well. The other
the alternative title for the Bard's Tale was Tales of
the Unknown Volume one when it was a fantasy RBG
and you. There was something really creative about the Bard's
Tale series, which was that you could import players from
(28:35):
other games all right on certain platforms app Apple two
is one of them. Yeah, um yeah, you can. You
can pull in things from from Ultima, which was from
Origin Systems that was not part of Electronic Arts at
that time, or from the aforementioned Wizardry, which was from Curtech,
also not part of e A. So these are games
made by other companies and allowed interoperability in the sense
(28:57):
that you could pull like if you had play this
other game and you had these characters that you had
developed some sort of emotional attachment to and you had
really invested in this game, you could then pull those
characters into The Bard's Tale and use them again in
a totally different game, which was kind of an awesome idea.
I will say that from my own personal experience from
(29:18):
playing Wizardry and then pulling characters in from Wizardry into
The Bard's Tale. They ended up being a tad overpowered,
like to the point where the whole first section of
the game was pointless to play because you just would
you know blast, Yeah, essentially like if I were to
encounter a moth and you were to give me a sledgehammer. Uh,
(29:42):
you know. That's kind of the way it felt. But
it was still a really cool game mechanic. Now. In
six and in they would release sequels to the Bard's Tales.
You get bards Tale two and Bard's Tale three. I
remember Bard's Tale three in particular, that was the one
I played the most. And into thousand four we saw
the release of The Bard's Tale. But this is a
(30:05):
game that was not released by e A, nor was
it connected directly to the Bard's Tale games. But it
was created by someone who had worked on the first two.
That's right, Yeah, that one of the people who helped
develop the maps in the first two Bards Tale games
was the developer behind The Bard's Tale the two thousand
four games. So I remember being excited when that game
(30:26):
came out because I thought, oh, they're relaunching this this
franchise that I loved as a kid. Yeah, it was
more just the name. I was still a fantasy RPG,
and you played a character who was very snarky thief.
Bard character voiced by Carrie El was. Oh man, well
that sounds that sounds worth playing just for just for that.
(30:46):
It was. It was entertaining first five minutes. You had
a narrator and you had Carrie Ell was this character,
and they would bicker as you played. So that was
kind of fun. But it again didn't relate back to
the Bard's Tale Games of My youth, So I was tricked.
They're tricks. E UH was also an e A released
(31:07):
their first productivity application, which was called Deluxe Paint. It's
a program for the Commodore Amiga, which was known as
a machine that was particularly powerful when it came to
graphics and sound. When you compared it against the other computers,
the Amiga blew them away. As far as that well,
I mean I had a friend who had Amiga, and
(31:28):
I remember just being completely flabbergasted that a computer could
do what his Amiga could do as far as graphics
and sound. We're concerned because when you compared it to
my Apple two or my two eighties six, it just
it outperformed him hands down in that So it was
a great game platform. But this was a painting platform
(31:49):
or a painting application, I should say, And it was
based off of an in house art development tool that
that e A had been using that they called Prism.
So they essentially took this in health tool and then
packaged it and changed it a bit for consumers. So hey, kids,
kids would be into this too. Yeah, like, you know,
we're using this to develop games, but I think people
(32:09):
would really be interested in using this for themselves. So
I'm sure they tweaked it so that would make sense
to a consumer, but hopefully yeah, or not just release
it the way it was, because you know, things, things
make you have different kinds of tools for people who
are professionals in an industry and people who are just
interested in it. Yeah, but yeah, that was an interesting
(32:31):
departure from just creating games. Um, I don't have anything,
and I should say I didn't say this at the
top of the show, but we're not going to cover
every release e A ever made, because first of all,
that would take us about five hours I think just
to list every game, and second of all, that would
that would be a really boring podcast that would be
that would be like like, yeah, even for our threshold,
(32:53):
that would be boring. So we don't want to I'm
just kidding. I'm just kidding, But no, I I agree entirely.
And so we're gonna mentioned some of the big ones, obviously,
especially the ones that ended up being disruptive to e
A or to the industry. But but in this case,
we're we're just kind of skimming through some of the
big ones and not hitting every single one. Son was
(33:14):
when e A set up a European division to market
PC games. Now, at this point it was just to
kind of be a marketing firm, not a development house,
but uh, they saw a lot of opportunity to expand
into Europe. The problem with Europe was that it was
(33:35):
being very it was very slow to adopt consoles. It
was this is true later on when we started getting
into the advanced consoles, to the ones like are the
current generation PlayStation forward Europe. It's not that Europe was
not interested in it's just it was slower to adopt
it than other markets. So e A was trying to
(33:58):
really invest in what they saw as being a huge opportunity. Yeah.
So so that's that was the beginning of that. And
in A released waste Land, which was a post apocalyptic
role playing game that's pretty you know, innovative. There were
some other post apocalyptic RPG type stuff that was out
for computers. Some of them were just text based games,
(34:20):
not even graphics games. But but yeah, wait, Wasteland is
one that that I I still we are still not
in the era of me playing video games that are
not um maybe super Mario Brothers. But but but I
but I A lot of my friends speak with speak
of it with a lot of nostalgia. See. The reason
why I know so many of these e A titles
(34:41):
is because I followed the same kind of pathway that
e A did, and that I abandoned consoles shortly after
the Atari era and moved on to PCs because I
saw it as being a platform that would allow for
more sophisticated types of games. And that's something that Hawkins
and self headset as well. It's one of the reasons
(35:02):
why e A in its early days focused on computers
not on consoles. There were other reasons as well, like
if you want to build a console or a game
for a console, it gets pretty expensive from a production standpoint,
because you have to manufacture the cartridges, you have to
build the ROMs directly onto chips, you have to build
the cases, all this kind of stuff. Um, and so
there were higher costs associated with producing a video game
(35:27):
cartridge than a computer disk. So, uh, they had their
own reasons for really focusing on computers versus consoles. So yeah,
the console market didn't really recover until until the ny
S came out, Tony, Yeah, yeah, right around the round
eighty eight, that's when e A started to reevaluate this
position of focusing on PC only instead of or computers only,
(35:51):
since PC we tend to think of as anything that
runs DOS or Windows. But anyway, at that that time,
that's when e A was starting to really look at
the NES and say, well, maybe there's a reason to
get into this now. Entering into any kind of agreement
with Nintendo was something that Hawkins was a bit reluctant
to do because Nintendo had very strict licensing agreements and
(36:16):
standards that you had to meet. Because Nintendo did not
want another video game crash. They absolutely they're being very
careful about what they published exactly. They did not want
the market flooded with bad games. Not to say that
every game that came out for the NES was amazing,
but they were trying to keep as much of a
control on that as possible. And you know that's something
(36:36):
that publishers are or or game developers might view as
being a barrier. You know, they might go through the
trouble of developing a game only to hit a roadblock
with the licensing problem, and then you've got all this
time and energy and money that was spent on something
that you can't actually sell. So there was a big
issue there. But they did decide to start developing games
(36:57):
for the NES, and the first one was Skate or Die,
which my friends who had any S IS they loved
that game. I did not have an any S so
I was largely ignorant of it. I was still playing
the computer games at that time. UH. And instead of
just publishing the game directly and distributing it, they actually
licensed it out to Konami. UH. And then Hawkins said
(37:19):
that the console market was still just unproven, that that
the crash from before was so devastating that you could
not be certain it wouldn't happen again, and also again
said that consoles were kind of underpowered when you compared
them to computers. UM. Now. They would later really revisit this,
especially once the Sega Genesis came out UH and and
(37:42):
their their tune changes dramatically, but at that time they
were really saying computers are really that's that's our main focus.
Consoles or something we might do as a side project. Sure,
so they released a game that became one of the
most important franchises in the company's history, and I am
of was talking about John Madden Football. UH. Hawkins has
(38:04):
a lot of There are a lot of interviews with
Hawkins where he talks about his fond memories of developing
that game, about bringing John Madden into the experience and
saying that, you know, we would show him how we
were doing things, and then he would spend the next
twenty minutes yelling at us about how we got it wrong.
And but it was always in an effort to make
sure the game was as good as it possibly could be.
(38:25):
So while Madden's approach was what some people might call
aggressive and meant that they were working on making a
really good football game, or at least that was there.
That was the goal, and it did become one of
the most successful franchises his history. Yeah, as their twenty
four games out and it's sold million units. Now we'll
(38:48):
talk more about some controversy with Madden Football, but that
really plays in a few years down the line. Uh.
In nine, they began to develop games for the Sega
Genesis console, and this is when they started to really
rethink that approach and say, all right, maybe consoles are
actually important enough for us to consider it being a
main line of business, not just some little side business
(39:10):
where we can make a little extra money. There might
be some serious cash in this business. Hawkins has said
that that this deal that he made with with Sega
was kind of a crowning moment and has has said
that he had been um kind of stealthily reverse engineering
the sixty bit Seco Genesis for a couple of years
and that when Sega found out about this, um, you
(39:30):
know it's it's it could have gone one of two ways.
Either Sega could have sued him a whole lot, or
they could have created this this kind of awesome contract
for for creating games, and and it went. Hawkins has
said that, yes, that this is one of his big
wins in life. He essentially said that that he negotiated
an incredibly favorable deal for Electronic Arts. This was something
(39:54):
he could not do in Nintendo because Nintendo held so
much of the power in that relationship. And uh, you know,
when it comes to big business, guys, you know whoever
holds the power that that becomes an important part of
of any deal. And it was certainly something that Hawkins
was very concerned about. Even if you think back to
the days of him saying, you know, I want this
company to be about video games and art, you can
(40:16):
tell there's still a cutthroat businessman lurking underneath that artist
exterior there and um, and so yeah, this was a
great example of that. And uh, in the fall of nine,
that's when Electronic Arts held its initial public offering, the
I p oh, That's when it became a publicly traded company.
And uh, Hawkins decided, in order to really justify going
(40:39):
public and to to get investors excited and invested in
the company and to really increase the value of the company,
to initiate a policy where every single month he expected
there to be three new games entering into the development process,
not not completed, but entered into So you know that
(41:00):
that would mean that as time goes on, you have
more and more overlapping games until some come out for
publication while others are entering the development process. It Uh,
it's set a pretty tough standard. But and also they
were handling games from other developers at this point too,
so that this didn't even include those games right right,
And the company at the time it's worth about sixty million,
(41:22):
yeah and uh, and of course the the value of
the company now is in the billions. But will again
address that when we get further up into the timeline.
And in ninety one, that is a momentous year for
both Hawkins and for e A. That's when Trip Hawkins
decided to leave e A. He had felt that he
had accomplished all he wanted with the company and that
(41:44):
it was time for him to move on to something
new and challenging. And that new and challenging thing ended
up being three d O, which was you know, the
whole idea was he was going to create a video
game console that would lead the market. It would be
the most powerful, uh console, and it actually it was
predictive of the consoles that we see today. It was
(42:07):
meant to be sort of an entertainment center, not just
a video game console, but it was really expensive. Uh.
And also the games that first came out for the
three D O didn't get a lot of critical acclaim
and a lot of them relied heavily on full motion video.
That was when full motion video was just becoming possible
in the computer and console worlds. So people were using
(42:29):
it a lot, to the point where it became a gimmick.
You know, you thought that, oh, this game is good
because as full motion video in it. Then and you know,
full motion video, like any other tool, is just a tool.
It's just a tool. Yeah, if you're if you're using
three D for example, these days, it's just just a gimmick.
It's just a gimmick. Yeah, exactly, so, and that was
the that was the ultimate problem with three D O,
which spoiler alert, did not take off. It actually it. Yeah. Meanwhile,
(42:56):
back at e A, Larry Probst steps in. He becomes
the CEO of e A, uh and uh. Nintendo that
same year ninety one launched the Super Nintendo Entertainment System,
the S and E s or Ness, if you insist
on pronouncing it that way. And then e A began
to develop games both for the Genesis and for Nintendo
(43:18):
and in an effort to really kind of hit as
many fans as possible. They also said they prefer there
to be lots of different consoles competing in the market
because that means there's not one dominant player that can
use the leverage against them. You know, when there are
a lot of different players out there, then e A
has the advantage, which has been an important part of
(43:39):
the company's Yeah, it's it's really clever business business standpoint. Yeah,
it's another one of those things that some people get
a little I think people want games to be fun
and they don't want to think about the business end
of it because the business end is not necessarily fun.
It can be pretty pretty, pretty grand. Yeah. But anyway,
(44:00):
that that was that was starting to take off right
in ninety one, and that was when e A made
its first real acquisition, which was Distinctive Software, So they
bought an outside development studio. The idea was to kind
of they saw talent out there that they wanted to get,
and instead of trying to hire the talent away, they thought, well,
(44:22):
we're a larger company. Now, we're publicly traded, we're highly valued.
Let's use this opportunity to purchase this other company and
make it part of what we do. And Distinctive Software
was the company that had created the test Drive series
for Accolade, which of course was a competing company to
Electronic Arts. And so this same division ended up creating
(44:46):
a new line of games for Electronic Arts called Need
for Speed. You know, you may have played those games. Uh.
And then eventually Distinctive Studios was renamed e A Canada
and it's it's because it was located at an British
Columbia that's correct, over in Vancouver. And uh. Yeah, that
was also the year that the e A established a
(45:08):
Sports as a division. Yeah, so now we finally have
an actual formal division within Electronic Arts that is overseeing
the development of sports titles. And a lot of big
sports titles came out of that division, Madden Football, FIFA
games that were related to hockey to basketball, um, and
of course that will become more important as well. That
(45:30):
wraps up a classic episode the Electronic Arts Story Part one.
I can't wait to find out what happens in part two,
even though it happened more than seven years ago now,
But we're gonna go and check that out next week.
If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover
on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter.
The handle at both of those is tech Stuff hs
(45:50):
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text
Stuff is an I heart Rate Deo production. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(46:12):
H
Welcome to text 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 a love all things tech, and it is time
for a tech Stuff classic episode. This episode originally published
(00:25):
on May two thousand thirteen. It is part one of
a two parter and it is called The Electronic Arts Story.
This is clearly one that I'm going to have to
do an update for a lot has happened in seven years,
and there's a lot more to say about e A.
But we have to have a start somewhere, right, So
let's go back and listen to the Electronic Arts Story,
(00:47):
Part one. This particular story is pretty interesting. We're specifically
talking about Electronic Arts or e A, which a lot
of people view these days as some sort of megalomaniacal
corporation on dominating the entire video game industry. Yeah, and
it's uh yeah, well, I mean, well we'll get into
it later on, but but it but it is one
worst company in America twice, two years in a row,
(01:10):
two years in a row. Yeah. Yeah, But but to
start off, you know, it's it didn't start off as
this UH company that was bent on on having a
stranglehold on the video game industry. And I'm not saying
that that's what he has now or that's goal, that's
what's goal is, but that's what that's the popular perception
that is. Well, you know, to be fair, it does
as twenty five million registered players and is operating out
(01:34):
of seventy five countries, so it's not doing too shadows company.
But but it had had interesting beginnings. Now to really
understand how A started, you actually have to go way
back before e A was a thing. Uh. And my
first date that I wrote down was in nineteen fifty
three because that's when William M. Trip Hawkins the third
(01:56):
was born. Now, this guy is going to be the
founder of EA when we get up to that point,
but um, he was. It was his idea to start
up a video game company and UH. And you know
the way he came about this was as he was
growing up and going to school, he started to get
really interested in uh, computers in general and games as well.
(02:20):
In fact, in nineteen seventy he designed a board game.
It was a football board game called ACU stat Pro Football. Yeah,
he borrowed five thousand dollars from his father to get
this off the ground. And it was a complete commercial failure. Right.
It was his first entrepreneurial attempt and it and it failed,
which often we can learn a lot more from our
(02:42):
failures than our successes. But it teaches us a couple
of things about Hawkins. That he's interested in games, and
he's interested in football in particular, which becomes extremely evident.
And during the evolution of e A right, right, and
he had started kind of designing stuff. He was a
big D and D player from I understand, and and
was really interested in how all of the math and
(03:03):
statistics worked. But noticed that a lot of his friends
were not interested in doing that at all, and so
he was kind of thinking like, hey, what if. Yeah,
he was looking at at different ways of creating sets
of rules and statistics. And and also at the same time,
he was starting to get interested in computers. Now in
the early seventies, this is predating the personal computer. If
(03:25):
you were interested in computers, it's because you had a
job that there were computers at your job, or maybe
you were attending university and they were computers there right
right in in seventy when he had his first interaction
ever with a prototype a micro computer. This was over
at a friend's house and uh, and that kind of
set him up for a couple of years later. Yeah,
in nineteen seventy three, he has access to a d
(03:46):
E C PDP eleven mini computer and he creates a
program written in the Basic programming language that was designed
to run simulations of football games. So not exactly a
fully interactive gaming experience. It's more like, if I put
in every player's stats and then set this to go
and have it play out as if it were a game,
(04:08):
what would the results be? And he tested it by
running a simulation of what was going to be at
that time, the nineteen seventy four Super Bowl game, and
it turned out that his his game ended up predicting
the final score fairly closely. In his game, it said
that the Dolphins would win over Minnesota twenty three to six,
(04:30):
and the real score was actually twenty four to seven,
So at least in that sense, the statistics seemed to
hold true. Now, of course, we all know that in reality,
from a day to day basis, statistics can give you
an indication of how things might go, but there's no
guarantee that's how they will go, right. Yeah, So so
(04:50):
Luck could have certainly been involved in that one, but
you know not. Nonetheless, he was a student at Harvard
at the time. He graduated with a self designed major
in strategy and applied game theory. That's an interesting major
right there, especially fore right, so he says that he
spent a couple of years convincing Harvard to to let
him get that degree because that was what he wanted.
(05:12):
And I would go on to get an MBA from Stanford. Yep.
And when he graduated in nineteen with that NBA, he
went to work for a little company called Apple. And
at that time it really was a little company. Yeah,
they had just just about fifty employees at the time. Yeah,
fifty employees. He had joined early on. This is, of course,
you know, right at the very onset of the personal
(05:33):
computer era. The Apple two was the first computer from
Apple to really hit it off in the market. The
first Apple was mostly adopted by people who were hobbyists
or really had a fascination with computers, but it was
not a commercial success. What didn't run away with the market,
Apple two was a totally different story. That was the
one that a larger niche began to get interested in
(05:56):
personal computers. It still was still you know, kind of
in the hobbyist air, rah, but it was a looser
definition of hobbyists at that point, not just people who
were obsessed with computers. And I mean that in the
nicest way. I come from a family that's part of
this niche. So yeah, Hawkins has said that in seven
he saw an Apple two at a computer fair and
(06:18):
realized that this was kind of you know, he had
been churning around this, this concept of of games and
computers and programming for a couple of years and decided
that Apple was, yes, the way to go. He's not
the only one either. There were a lot of early
game developers who were looking at personal computers as the
platform of choice, and many of them, uh showed an
(06:39):
early preference for the Apple to Richard Garriott of Origin
also had that same fascination. So Hawkins works for Apple.
By two, he was the director of strategy and marketing
at Apple Computers. So from yeah, that those humble beginnings,
and of course by then Apple was doing very very
well and had already at its initial public offering, which
(07:02):
netted Hawkins quite a bit of money and so he
made a big, risky decision. He decided that his fascination
of games and computers needed to really be indulged, and
so he left Apple Computer. Well, he supposedly had had
decided almost a decade prior that in two would be
(07:23):
the year for him to start a business, to start
a computer business, and that that that would be the
year that that the home computing market had caught up
to his desire to plan it. Now, now, I both
of us honestly don't know whether or not that's truly
what he thought that some of the stuff, some of
the stuff he says, he says, well, after the time rights,
(07:44):
it could be retcond is all I'm saying. I'm not
saying he definitely did do that. I'm just I have
a little bit of skepticism either either way. On two
fun fact, the day before I was born, Um, in
case any he needed to feel really old. Right now,
thank you, La, You're welcome. Um, he he incorporated Electronic
(08:06):
Arts and And this was not going to This was
not the original name that he had thought of for
the company. No, No, he actually originally wanted to call
it Amazing Software, but that just didn't seem to really click.
He got a bunch of people together to try and
uh brainstorm and idea. He had actually used two thousand
dollars of his own money to fund this early part
(08:28):
of the company, UH, and he they started thinking about
other possible names. One of the names they came up
with was soft Art, but the head of another company
that was called Software Software Arts asked him if he
would reconsider naming his company that just to avoid any confusion,
and he agreed to do that. Had another brainstorming session
and that came up with Electronic Arts. Along with a
(08:49):
team of other folks and marketing people as well an
outside marketing company, and Electronic Arts was born. They would
actually receive by the end of nine two two million
dollars in venture capital from Sequoia Capital, and Sequoia Capital
even gave them some office space to work out of
before they had any sort of physical headquarters, right right,
(09:09):
very originally, I think he worked out of his own
home when he was hiring his first couple of people,
and UH, all of these people that he was hiring
at the time, and the naming of the company kind
of came about because he really wanted, um, he really
believed that computer games are an art form and wanted
UM wanted the game company to operate kind of like
(09:29):
a music label. UM. And this is really evident in
some of their early marketing campaigns and attempts. You know,
they would get these game developers together and pose them
like rock stars have, have rock music photographers come in
and do these gorgeous photographs of them and and really
concentrate on the software artist. Yeah, even the art they
would use in their the games they sold, which in
(09:50):
those days, games didn't come in boxes yet. They were
in usually plastic bags, and you had some art that
would be included. But it it looked pretty look like
a lot of Yeah, it look like a lot of
these games came out of someone's garage. And here's here's
a fun fact. A lot of them did. UM but
uh e A. They took an approach where they really
(10:11):
put a lot of graphic design work into the art
that was included with the games. And there were several
sources I read that likened the the art on the
games to album you would see on what we used
to you know, buy music on, which were these giant
vinyl albums. I actually kids are doing that again now,
(10:32):
but bund there was a while where I would say
vinyl album and I just get that blank stare um.
Those days appeared to have disappeared again for at least
a while, but I'll see that keeps up. They actually
moved to the headquarters in San Mateo, California, and they
were there for quite a few years. Ultimately they ended
up moving again. But and also you know, e A
(10:55):
expanded greatly, But we'll get into all of that. So
they're early early efforts were concentrated on a few titles, uh,
and they wanted to produce all of their games internally.
They wanted to be a publisher, a developer, and a distributor.
So these are all different parts of the video game industry.
(11:18):
And you can have a company that's just one of
these things, or you can have a company that does
multiple roles here. But to break it down, essentially, you
have publishers that these are the companies that fund the
development of video games. Now, they might have a development
team within the publisher, or they may pay an independent
developer to create a game, but they are the ones
(11:39):
who say, here's some money, we believe in the project
that you have pitched, why don't you go ahead and
build that game. Then you give us the game, and
we will make sure the game gets to distributors, who
will then make sure the game gets two stores. And
then the way it generally works if if you're talking
about an independent developer and a publisher, the publisher will
give an advance to the developer, and that advance is
(12:02):
against any future royalties that the game sells until you
pay off that advance, and then you usually have some
sort of royalty sharing program where the publisher gets a
certain amount of the money from sales and the developer
gets another you know, a percentage of those sales as well,
but the advance has to be paid off first because
that's the initial investment the publisher makes to the developer.
(12:24):
Developers are of course, those are the people who developed
the games, are the ones who actually build the games.
So again, it can be an independent company, it could
be part of a publisher, it could be part of
a distributor. Uh, either are all different types of models
out there, but these are the people actually building the code,
making the art, writing the games. That's that's yeah. Then
you've got the distributors. Now, these are the people who
(12:46):
are responsible for delivering finished games from publishers and delivering
them to retail establishments and other outlets, so they sell gain.
The publishers sell their games to distributors, and then the
distributors take those games and sell them to the retail
operators who then sell them to the public. So e
A was all three of these things right. And at
(13:07):
the time, Hawkins has said that he had done a
lot of market research and that a hundred and thirty
five of his competitors were doing the same thing um
which which seems like an awfully large number, although at
the time we were just on the verge of a
little bit of a market crash a little bit, a
little bit as a little bit is understating it. Yeah,
(13:28):
but but but but during this boom there were there
was a lot going on um and And also the
concept reminds me a lot of Apple's Apple is a
really terrific example of vertical integration and um and from
his time at Apple, I feel like probably that's one
of the places where he picked up this concept. We'll
be back to talk more about e A in just
(13:49):
a moment, but first let's take a quick break. The
first six titles from e A included games called Hard
Hat mac which was kind of like a Mario clone.
Um it's or Donkey Kong clone. I really should say
(14:12):
not Mario, but a Donkey Kong clone. It was a
platforming game a side not even a side scralling. It
was you know, it's kind of like Donkey Kong. Then
you had the pinball construction set. There was a game
called which you don't let you build pinball systems. Then
you had arcn which was kind of a weird fantasy
strategy game that was part chess, part action game. The
(14:36):
idea being that you have two sides. Uh. Two sides
have different pieces that are kind of like chess pieces.
The different pieces have different abilities, and you try to
take over your opponent's territory. Whenever one of your pieces
comes in contact with an opponent's piece, you then have
a little arcade like battle between the two. Right and
depending upon what your pieces, you might be able to
(14:58):
really whoop up on your opponent because you're faster or
your shots do a lot more damage. Uh and and
so it was all about strategy, like I want to
make sure this piece goes up against my that piece
my opponent has, so I can I can win the game.
You can kind of tell that I played the heck
out of this game. By the way, I also owned
the Pinball Construction set and I owned hard Hat Mac.
(15:21):
Then there was a Mule, which was another strategy game.
A lot of people who enjoyed this really like things
like a war gaming where you would have the big
table with all the hexagons, we move the pieces around.
Mule was kind of the computer version of that. Yeah,
it was really built for four players, which at the
time was was kind of unheard of. Yeah, and I
(15:43):
never got into it because my brain does not work
that way. I can I can do well enough in
our con because even if my strategy skills aren't that great,
my twitch skills were good enough to help me get by,
but Mule not so much. Then there was Worms, which
was kind of a high concept game where you would
train these what they called worms, these these these lines
(16:03):
of light to behave in a certain way in order
to progress in the game. And it's very difficult to explain.
And I've always seen people who say, if you want
to play the game, if you want to try it out,
find a copy of it and give it a whirl.
I mean, you can find stuff like this on the internet. Uh,
you should do it without reading the instructions, just to
(16:24):
see if you can figure out what the heck is
going on. Um. And I mean I read a description
of this, and I'm not sure I would be able
to figure it out. But maybe it's more intuitive than
the descriptions would give you. Uh that then the description
seemed to indicate. And then the last of the six
titles that they launched with when the company was first
(16:44):
offering up games was Murder on These zinder Kneuf, which
I know nothing about. I did not own that one. Yeah,
I I should put in that I have played zero
of these games. Well, they you know, right around when
you were one, so I'm not surprised. So but I
had most of these games because they came out for
the Apple too, and we had an Apple too. And
(17:08):
actually what happened was a local school had purchased a
bunch of games and then they gave them to me
to test and tell them which ones were educational and
which ones were not really educational. So I did, and
then I returned all the games and they said, all right,
you can keep all the ones that aren't educational. Yeah,
So as a kid, I was like ching and um,
(17:29):
and so yeah, I ended up with a lot of
a lot of early games. That's also how I ended
up learning about the Ultimate series because Ultimate two was
one of those games. But uh yeah, so there was
that was the initial launching title, but there were some
other ones that came out shortly thereafter. There was The
Last Gladiator, which is a game I also owned. Um
(17:52):
that that one didn't come in the batch. I won
that one as a as a part of a lip
syncing contest. What pray tell, were you lip sinking? Me
and my dad did a lip sinking routine to raise
Stevens the Pirates song, which is all about a pirate
who wants to sing and dance and wear bright shiny pants.
(18:15):
Well that's that's a that's awesome. Yeah. We won first place,
which was a fifty dollar gift certificate to a local
comics store. And I don't read comic books, so I
bought all their computer games instead, and one of them
was The Last Gladiator, And that was a game where
you play as a little gladiator and all these different
monsters come out and based upon whatever weapon you have
at your disposal, you have uh you know, decent chances
(18:38):
against them. It gets more and more difficult as the
game goes on. You know, it's kind of a typical
Arcady experience. Um. They also had they launched a game
that would end up being sort of the genesis of
e A sports. Dr J and Larry Bird Go one
on one. I'm told this is from a sport called
basketball and so on. That's one with the orange round thing. Correct, Uh,
(19:01):
I want to say yes, yeah, this this was one
of the earliest. Uh well, it was the earliest sports
game from e A and Hawkins really struck on a
brilliant idea. He had decided to try and approach people
who were famous in various sports and to license their
their names to get that media tie in. Yeah right, Yeah,
(19:22):
they get a promotional tie in from famous famous athletes,
I mean Dr J and Larry Bird or especially at
the world famous and and which is interesting because the
world famous since they were playing an American sport that
was almost exclusively played in America. Um. They ended up
that they ended up paying off big time and being
(19:44):
a strategy that e A still to this day employees.
They also established a new policy which was to in
order to keep more of the profits that it would
get from its uh from the sales it was going
to reduce the discount it gave software distributor sports games,
meaning that uh, they were essentially selling their games at
(20:05):
a higher cost. Two stores saying all right, well, you know,
we're no longer going to sell this game to you
at ten dollars a copy. We're gonna sell it to
you for thirty dollars a copy. And uh, and you
know it's your truck. Uh, it's your problem to figure
out how to sell this. So if you're if you
usually sell your games at forty dollars, now you're paying
(20:26):
thirty bucks to sell it for forty, your profit margin
has shrunk as a software disc a software retail store. Um,
you know, do you continue trying to do that? Do
you hike your prices up and hope that people are
willing to pay it? Uh. E A's point was that, hey,
we're starting to make a name for ourselves. People know
our product and they like it. So if if they
(20:46):
like it and this is the only way they can
get it, then you're gonna have to play ball with us.
And this is sort of the first example of e
A really throwing its weight around. Yeah. This was also
the year that it made its conference debut at the
Consumer Electronics Show, and so, yeah, they were really really
getting out there in the public and starting to make
make waves. Yeah, and keep in mind this is all
(21:08):
in the first year that they're actually offering games. You know,
they had been a company for a while, but of course,
you know, as soon as they became a company, it
didn't mean that they had games to offer everybody them. Uh.
They also had established these ideas that you know, every
single person who worked on the game was going to
be credited. If you were the creator of a game,
your name was front and center on the game's screens.
(21:32):
It would let you know that this was a game
developed by so and so. And that was a response
to a lot of the the activity they were seeing
on the console market, particularly with Atari. Uh, and that
there were people who were essentially anonymous game developers who
had put in hours and hours and hours of time
to create video games, but there was no sign of
(21:54):
credit for them on on the actual video games. It
was just you know, is this is you ex title
from X company? Sure. Yeah. The word that I've seen
tossed around in a lot of articles about it is
is surfs that these people were being treated like surfs
and and Hawkins was was saying that you know, some
(22:15):
of these kids that he had met out at Apple
were were and I quote legitimate divas, and and that
they deserved better than that. Yeah, and they Let's make
it clear, e A was not the only company doing this.
There were other companies that split off from Atari, for example,
that were founded by developers who wanted to have more
(22:36):
more control and more credit for the work that they
were doing. So e A is one example of that,
but it's by no means the only example of that.
Now UH in four Larry Probst joined the company as
the vice president of sales, and he will become really
important to e A. He was already important at that point,
(22:56):
but becomes even more so over the years. UH and
e A begins to distribute games from other companies, not
just their own companies. So now they're becoming a distributor
for other UH publishers. And one of the first ones
was Lucasfilm Games. There was also s s I and Interplay.
They all used Electronic Arts as a distributor. So now
(23:18):
they're bringing in money not only from the games that
they are developing in their their own house, but also
from developers. Yeah, this was this was the year that
the that the video game market really crashed or was
really feeling all of the effects of the crash. Um.
And this was due to a lot of a lot
of things, but um, but but mostly you know, Atari
(23:39):
had been kind of sort of driving the market into
the ground for a minute. Yeah, yeah, the market was
completely flooded with games, and and not good games necessarily.
There were some there's some great titles that were among
the ones that came out that year, but there were
Atari had essentially lowered the bar so far for anyone
(23:59):
to submit games to the console that it was flooded
with games that were just rushed, that had bad art,
that were poorly constructed, that were impossible to play. Um.
And this made people stop wanting to buy games because
they were just not fun. Right. And also there were
so many consoles on the market, you know, it had
(24:21):
kind of boomed, and and these things cost four to
eight hundred dollars in today's in today's concept of the dollar, right,
and so you know, yeah, it was it was not
sustainable at the time without the quality of games that
were coming out, and there was such an early boom
that it was just a rush, right, and then the
rush was followed by a bubble bursting, which we see
all the time, not just in technology but in all
(24:43):
kinds of markets. And uh and so you know, as
of a game company, Electronic Arts had a tough year
ahead of it because you know that was it was
affected to it. Even though a lot of its games
were being made for specters. I was saying p seas
but really at this time we weren't really calling the
PCs yet, but yeah, they were being made for computers.
(25:05):
It still was affected because uh, you know, a lot
of consumers got jaded on the concept of games in
the first place. That was, however, the year that they
published a game called The Seven Cities of Gold, which
I also owned. Uh yeah, I was. I was known
for being a terrible, terrible columnists colonialist. I guess I
should say I would go in and wreak havoc on
(25:27):
the various Mayan and az tech cultures and plunder them. Yeah.
I've heard that it was a very educational game, edutainment
edutainment toll. Yeah. I want to say that I bought
that one, and that one was not part of the package,
because if it were part of the package. Then obviously
I fipped about it being educational. Um. And then e
A began to switch its strategy at this point, when
(25:50):
the video game market had crashed, and instead of marketing
games as being from specific creators the way they had
been where they had made these developers rock stars, uh,
they were instead going to look at creating actual brands
and genres. So instead of saying from the mind of
so and so, they said, why don't we find a
game that really resonates with people and then just continue
(26:13):
to create games within that brand title or more even
just within that type of gameplay. Uh. This would actually
end up being something that people would criticize e A
four years later to the point where they well, they've
they've taken it to something of an extreme, but we'll
get into that. Yeah, Like yes, and they also decided
to start making games for lots of different platforms. So
(26:36):
besides the Apple two, they started looking at the Macintosh,
which was brand new in uh, the Amiga, the Commodore
sixty four IBM compatibles, which were just starting to take
off right around then. Uh, the Atari eight hundred, and
the Attari st We've got a bit more to say
about electronic arts. But first, let's take another quick break.
(27:05):
All right, we're back, and let's go back into what's
going on with the e A. So comes round and
e A starts releasing a bunch of games, including some
that were really famous in the fantasy gaming genre. Uh,
the big one being The Bard's Tale, which I also owned.
(27:25):
I did, I did not? I think. Well, it was
very Dungeons and Dragons ish. You would control a party
of players. You would you would generate characters and then
put them together in a party, and uh, this was
kind of standard for a lot of other video games
at the time. Wizardry was very similar in this respect,
where you would have certain number of fighters, a certain
(27:48):
number of magic users, maybe a thief or even a
bard who could affect the way the party performed by
playing different songs. That was one of the big innovative
gameplay elements of The Bard's Tale. So you know, play
a little song and then everyone gets gets all amped
up and they fight better, or you play another song
and everyone's starting to feel kind of chill and they
start healing and faster. That's terrific, useful bards, that's crazy. Yeah, yeah,
(28:12):
as opposed to and uh, there's this guy Guy's singing again.
We can't get them to shut up. We've broken four
loots and he doesn't get the hint. Well. The other
the alternative title for the Bard's Tale was Tales of
the Unknown Volume one when it was a fantasy RBG
and you. There was something really creative about the Bard's
Tale series, which was that you could import players from
(28:35):
other games all right on certain platforms app Apple two
is one of them. Yeah, um yeah, you can. You
can pull in things from from Ultima, which was from
Origin Systems that was not part of Electronic Arts at
that time, or from the aforementioned Wizardry, which was from Curtech,
also not part of e A. So these are games
made by other companies and allowed interoperability in the sense
(28:57):
that you could pull like if you had play this
other game and you had these characters that you had
developed some sort of emotional attachment to and you had
really invested in this game, you could then pull those
characters into The Bard's Tale and use them again in
a totally different game, which was kind of an awesome idea.
I will say that from my own personal experience from
(29:18):
playing Wizardry and then pulling characters in from Wizardry into
The Bard's Tale. They ended up being a tad overpowered,
like to the point where the whole first section of
the game was pointless to play because you just would
you know blast, Yeah, essentially like if I were to
encounter a moth and you were to give me a sledgehammer. Uh,
(29:42):
you know. That's kind of the way it felt. But
it was still a really cool game mechanic. Now. In
six and in they would release sequels to the Bard's Tales.
You get bards Tale two and Bard's Tale three. I
remember Bard's Tale three in particular, that was the one
I played the most. And into thousand four we saw
the release of The Bard's Tale. But this is a
(30:05):
game that was not released by e A, nor was
it connected directly to the Bard's Tale games. But it
was created by someone who had worked on the first two.
That's right, Yeah, that one of the people who helped
develop the maps in the first two Bards Tale games
was the developer behind The Bard's Tale the two thousand
four games. So I remember being excited when that game
(30:26):
came out because I thought, oh, they're relaunching this this
franchise that I loved as a kid. Yeah, it was
more just the name. I was still a fantasy RPG,
and you played a character who was very snarky thief.
Bard character voiced by Carrie El was. Oh man, well
that sounds that sounds worth playing just for just for that.
(30:46):
It was. It was entertaining first five minutes. You had
a narrator and you had Carrie Ell was this character,
and they would bicker as you played. So that was
kind of fun. But it again didn't relate back to
the Bard's Tale Games of My youth, So I was tricked.
They're tricks. E UH was also an e A released
(31:07):
their first productivity application, which was called Deluxe Paint. It's
a program for the Commodore Amiga, which was known as
a machine that was particularly powerful when it came to
graphics and sound. When you compared it against the other computers,
the Amiga blew them away. As far as that well,
I mean I had a friend who had Amiga, and
(31:28):
I remember just being completely flabbergasted that a computer could
do what his Amiga could do as far as graphics
and sound. We're concerned because when you compared it to
my Apple two or my two eighties six, it just
it outperformed him hands down in that So it was
a great game platform. But this was a painting platform
(31:49):
or a painting application, I should say, And it was
based off of an in house art development tool that
that e A had been using that they called Prism.
So they essentially took this in health tool and then
packaged it and changed it a bit for consumers. So hey, kids,
kids would be into this too. Yeah, like, you know,
we're using this to develop games, but I think people
(32:09):
would really be interested in using this for themselves. So
I'm sure they tweaked it so that would make sense
to a consumer, but hopefully yeah, or not just release
it the way it was, because you know, things, things
make you have different kinds of tools for people who
are professionals in an industry and people who are just
interested in it. Yeah, but yeah, that was an interesting
(32:31):
departure from just creating games. Um, I don't have anything,
and I should say I didn't say this at the
top of the show, but we're not going to cover
every release e A ever made, because first of all,
that would take us about five hours I think just
to list every game, and second of all, that would
that would be a really boring podcast that would be
that would be like like, yeah, even for our threshold,
(32:53):
that would be boring. So we don't want to I'm
just kidding. I'm just kidding, But no, I I agree entirely.
And so we're gonna mentioned some of the big ones, obviously,
especially the ones that ended up being disruptive to e
A or to the industry. But but in this case,
we're we're just kind of skimming through some of the
big ones and not hitting every single one. Son was
(33:14):
when e A set up a European division to market
PC games. Now, at this point it was just to
kind of be a marketing firm, not a development house,
but uh, they saw a lot of opportunity to expand
into Europe. The problem with Europe was that it was
(33:35):
being very it was very slow to adopt consoles. It
was this is true later on when we started getting
into the advanced consoles, to the ones like are the
current generation PlayStation forward Europe. It's not that Europe was
not interested in it's just it was slower to adopt
it than other markets. So e A was trying to
(33:58):
really invest in what they saw as being a huge opportunity. Yeah.
So so that's that was the beginning of that. And
in A released waste Land, which was a post apocalyptic
role playing game that's pretty you know, innovative. There were
some other post apocalyptic RPG type stuff that was out
for computers. Some of them were just text based games,
(34:20):
not even graphics games. But but yeah, wait, Wasteland is
one that that I I still we are still not
in the era of me playing video games that are
not um maybe super Mario Brothers. But but but I
but I A lot of my friends speak with speak
of it with a lot of nostalgia. See. The reason
why I know so many of these e A titles
(34:41):
is because I followed the same kind of pathway that
e A did, and that I abandoned consoles shortly after
the Atari era and moved on to PCs because I
saw it as being a platform that would allow for
more sophisticated types of games. And that's something that Hawkins
and self headset as well. It's one of the reasons
(35:02):
why e A in its early days focused on computers
not on consoles. There were other reasons as well, like
if you want to build a console or a game
for a console, it gets pretty expensive from a production standpoint,
because you have to manufacture the cartridges, you have to
build the ROMs directly onto chips, you have to build
the cases, all this kind of stuff. Um, and so
there were higher costs associated with producing a video game
(35:27):
cartridge than a computer disk. So, uh, they had their
own reasons for really focusing on computers versus consoles. So yeah,
the console market didn't really recover until until the ny
S came out, Tony, Yeah, yeah, right around the round
eighty eight, that's when e A started to reevaluate this
position of focusing on PC only instead of or computers only,
(35:51):
since PC we tend to think of as anything that
runs DOS or Windows. But anyway, at that that time,
that's when e A was starting to really look at
the NES and say, well, maybe there's a reason to
get into this now. Entering into any kind of agreement
with Nintendo was something that Hawkins was a bit reluctant
to do because Nintendo had very strict licensing agreements and
(36:16):
standards that you had to meet. Because Nintendo did not
want another video game crash. They absolutely they're being very
careful about what they published exactly. They did not want
the market flooded with bad games. Not to say that
every game that came out for the NES was amazing,
but they were trying to keep as much of a
control on that as possible. And you know that's something
(36:36):
that publishers are or or game developers might view as
being a barrier. You know, they might go through the
trouble of developing a game only to hit a roadblock
with the licensing problem, and then you've got all this
time and energy and money that was spent on something
that you can't actually sell. So there was a big
issue there. But they did decide to start developing games
(36:57):
for the NES, and the first one was Skate or Die,
which my friends who had any S IS they loved
that game. I did not have an any S so
I was largely ignorant of it. I was still playing
the computer games at that time. UH. And instead of
just publishing the game directly and distributing it, they actually
licensed it out to Konami. UH. And then Hawkins said
(37:19):
that the console market was still just unproven, that that
the crash from before was so devastating that you could
not be certain it wouldn't happen again, and also again
said that consoles were kind of underpowered when you compared
them to computers. UM. Now. They would later really revisit this,
especially once the Sega Genesis came out UH and and
(37:42):
their their tune changes dramatically, but at that time they
were really saying computers are really that's that's our main focus.
Consoles or something we might do as a side project. Sure,
so they released a game that became one of the
most important franchises in the company's history, and I am
of was talking about John Madden Football. UH. Hawkins has
(38:04):
a lot of There are a lot of interviews with
Hawkins where he talks about his fond memories of developing
that game, about bringing John Madden into the experience and
saying that, you know, we would show him how we
were doing things, and then he would spend the next
twenty minutes yelling at us about how we got it wrong.
And but it was always in an effort to make
sure the game was as good as it possibly could be.
(38:25):
So while Madden's approach was what some people might call
aggressive and meant that they were working on making a
really good football game, or at least that was there.
That was the goal, and it did become one of
the most successful franchises his history. Yeah, as their twenty
four games out and it's sold million units. Now we'll
(38:48):
talk more about some controversy with Madden Football, but that
really plays in a few years down the line. Uh.
In nine, they began to develop games for the Sega
Genesis console, and this is when they started to really
rethink that approach and say, all right, maybe consoles are
actually important enough for us to consider it being a
main line of business, not just some little side business
(39:10):
where we can make a little extra money. There might
be some serious cash in this business. Hawkins has said
that that this deal that he made with with Sega
was kind of a crowning moment and has has said
that he had been um kind of stealthily reverse engineering
the sixty bit Seco Genesis for a couple of years
and that when Sega found out about this, um, you
(39:30):
know it's it's it could have gone one of two ways.
Either Sega could have sued him a whole lot, or
they could have created this this kind of awesome contract
for for creating games, and and it went. Hawkins has
said that, yes, that this is one of his big
wins in life. He essentially said that that he negotiated
an incredibly favorable deal for Electronic Arts. This was something
(39:54):
he could not do in Nintendo because Nintendo held so
much of the power in that relationship. And uh, you know,
when it comes to big business, guys, you know whoever
holds the power that that becomes an important part of
of any deal. And it was certainly something that Hawkins
was very concerned about. Even if you think back to
the days of him saying, you know, I want this
company to be about video games and art, you can
(40:16):
tell there's still a cutthroat businessman lurking underneath that artist
exterior there and um, and so yeah, this was a
great example of that. And uh, in the fall of nine,
that's when Electronic Arts held its initial public offering, the
I p oh, That's when it became a publicly traded company.
And uh, Hawkins decided, in order to really justify going
(40:39):
public and to to get investors excited and invested in
the company and to really increase the value of the company,
to initiate a policy where every single month he expected
there to be three new games entering into the development process,
not not completed, but entered into So you know that
(41:00):
that would mean that as time goes on, you have
more and more overlapping games until some come out for
publication while others are entering the development process. It Uh,
it's set a pretty tough standard. But and also they
were handling games from other developers at this point too,
so that this didn't even include those games right right,
And the company at the time it's worth about sixty million,
(41:22):
yeah and uh, and of course the the value of
the company now is in the billions. But will again
address that when we get further up into the timeline.
And in ninety one, that is a momentous year for
both Hawkins and for e A. That's when Trip Hawkins
decided to leave e A. He had felt that he
had accomplished all he wanted with the company and that
(41:44):
it was time for him to move on to something
new and challenging. And that new and challenging thing ended
up being three d O, which was you know, the
whole idea was he was going to create a video
game console that would lead the market. It would be
the most powerful, uh console, and it actually it was
predictive of the consoles that we see today. It was
(42:07):
meant to be sort of an entertainment center, not just
a video game console, but it was really expensive. Uh.
And also the games that first came out for the
three D O didn't get a lot of critical acclaim
and a lot of them relied heavily on full motion video.
That was when full motion video was just becoming possible
in the computer and console worlds. So people were using
(42:29):
it a lot, to the point where it became a gimmick.
You know, you thought that, oh, this game is good
because as full motion video in it. Then and you know,
full motion video, like any other tool, is just a tool.
It's just a tool. Yeah, if you're if you're using
three D for example, these days, it's just just a gimmick.
It's just a gimmick. Yeah, exactly, so, and that was
the that was the ultimate problem with three D O,
which spoiler alert, did not take off. It actually it. Yeah. Meanwhile,
(42:56):
back at e A, Larry Probst steps in. He becomes
the CEO of e A, uh and uh. Nintendo that
same year ninety one launched the Super Nintendo Entertainment System,
the S and E s or Ness, if you insist
on pronouncing it that way. And then e A began
to develop games both for the Genesis and for Nintendo
(43:18):
and in an effort to really kind of hit as
many fans as possible. They also said they prefer there
to be lots of different consoles competing in the market
because that means there's not one dominant player that can
use the leverage against them. You know, when there are
a lot of different players out there, then e A
has the advantage, which has been an important part of
(43:39):
the company's Yeah, it's it's really clever business business standpoint. Yeah,
it's another one of those things that some people get
a little I think people want games to be fun
and they don't want to think about the business end
of it because the business end is not necessarily fun.
It can be pretty pretty, pretty grand. Yeah. But anyway,
(44:00):
that that was that was starting to take off right
in ninety one, and that was when e A made
its first real acquisition, which was Distinctive Software, So they
bought an outside development studio. The idea was to kind
of they saw talent out there that they wanted to get,
and instead of trying to hire the talent away, they thought, well,
(44:22):
we're a larger company. Now, we're publicly traded, we're highly valued.
Let's use this opportunity to purchase this other company and
make it part of what we do. And Distinctive Software
was the company that had created the test Drive series
for Accolade, which of course was a competing company to
Electronic Arts. And so this same division ended up creating
(44:46):
a new line of games for Electronic Arts called Need
for Speed. You know, you may have played those games. Uh.
And then eventually Distinctive Studios was renamed e A Canada
and it's it's because it was located at an British
Columbia that's correct, over in Vancouver. And uh. Yeah, that
was also the year that the e A established a
(45:08):
Sports as a division. Yeah, so now we finally have
an actual formal division within Electronic Arts that is overseeing
the development of sports titles. And a lot of big
sports titles came out of that division, Madden Football, FIFA
games that were related to hockey to basketball, um, and
of course that will become more important as well. That
(45:30):
wraps up a classic episode the Electronic Arts Story Part one.
I can't wait to find out what happens in part two,
even though it happened more than seven years ago now,
But we're gonna go and check that out next week.
If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover
on tech Stuff, reach out to me on Facebook or Twitter.
The handle at both of those is tech Stuff hs
(45:50):
W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text
Stuff is an I heart Rate Deo production. For more
podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(46:12):
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