Electronic Arts was founded May 28th, 1982. It was founded to be a different kind of software company, a reaction to what was happening at the time in the software industry.
Giving developers credit
Software developers didn’t get the respect they deserved in the early 1980s. Technology executives like Atari’s Ray Kassar saw them as semi-skilled labor, no harder to replace than the assembly line workers who assembled and boxed their company’s products. Trip Hawkins, the former Director of Product Marketing for Apple, decided to try to take a different approach to publishing software. He called his new company Amazin’ Software, but changed the name to Electronic Arts in November 1982, a name that his employees liked better and that better fit his concept. He called software developers electronic artists.
Early software publishers made it an uphill battle to get to put your name on your software. Electronic Arts changed that, not only putting the programmer’s name on the title screen like Activision did, but putting it on the packaging, along with their photo. Not only that, the packaging resembled the packaging of a vinyl record. This reduced costs but also played into the vibe EA was going for. EA was trying to be more like a 1960s record label than a software publisher. Rather than merely absorbing small development studios’ work into their catalog like Atarisoft did, EA treated those indie developers like rock bands.
Electronic Arts’ early titles
And in its early days, Electronic Arts had something special. Their early titles for home computers included M.U.L.E., a multiplayer sci-fi game where you settled a distant planet; Archon, a chess-like game that incorporated magic; One on One, an electronic take on a common driveway basketball game but with NBA stars Larry Bird and Dr. J.; and The Bard’s Tale, a dungeon crawl set in the fictional town of Skara Brae.
Early EA developers weren’t employees. They worked independently or had their own small development studio. These independents handled the programming, while EA handled the distribution and promotion. Each developer had their preferred platform, which was often the Atari 800, and then EA arranged porting the title to other home computers of the time. Most EA titles were available for Amstrad CPC, Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and ZX Spectrum.
How Electronic Arts is different today
If all of this sounds different from the EA of today, you’re right. In 1987, EA started moving development in house and buying out those small development houses, shifting its model to resemble a more traditional software publisher. It held its IPO on March 26, 1990 and Trip Hawkins left in 1991. His next venture was 3DO, which tried to be a different kind of game console, but didn’t prove as successful as EA had been.
Today EA is a $7.5 billion company and is among the last names that come to mind when you think of indie game development. But it started out as a vehicle for publishing and promoting indie developers.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
The first “Computer Chronicles” episode to cover computer gaming features two of EA’s launch titles: “Pinball Construction Set” and “One on One,” with Bill Budge and Trip Hawkins appearing on the program personally to demonstrate. One of Paul Schindler’s earliest software reviews of the show featured a third launch title in “Archon.”