Electronic Arts | Code Like It's 198x

“Can a computer make you cry?” asked the first advertisement for Electronic Arts, in 1983. It answered, “Right now, no one knows,” and went on to say that the people who asked such questions had always been “writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians… in the traditional sense, artists”, not people who ran software companies. EA meant to change that. It printed its programmers’ names and photographs in its adverts, packaged its games like record albums, called its developers “artists” as an ordinary working term, and gave each of them a producer, as a film studio would.

Fast facts

Founded: 1982 by Trip Hawkins, formerly Apple’s director of marketing for the Lisa computer. Based in San Mateo, California.
First products: shipped in May 1983, among them Pinball Construction Set, Archon and M.U.L.E.
Slogan: “We see farther.”
Amiga: an early supporter; published Deluxe Paint and devised the IFF file format in 1985.
Britain: games sold under the Ariolasoft name from 1985; EA’s own European office opened in Langley, Berkshire, in 1987.
Consoles: licensed to make its own Mega Drive cartridges after reverse-engineering the machine.
Chief executives after Hawkins: Larry Probst (1991), John Riccitiello (2007), Andrew Wilson (2013).
Owners since August 2026: a consortium of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners.

Amazing Software

Hawkins was, in Amiga Computing’s words, “a visionary by the name of William M Hawkins, better known as Trip”, who had worked out while at Apple “that it was software — not hardware — that made people want to buy computers”. Computer Gaming World recorded in 1991 that the company was “originally slated to be ‘Amazing Software’” before it took the name Electronic Arts. Hawkins recalled in 1995 that when he founded it, “there were about 10 other people who I considered to be my co-founders who were all hired as employees before we actually had our first real office”. Amiga Computing named Tim Mott, previously of Xerox, who was to “make sure that people got the tools that they needed”, and Dave Evans, who looked for talent.

EA introduced itself with a party. It had no stand at the 1982 San Francisco Applefest, Computer Gaming World remembered, “but they put on the best ‘show’”: a bus took industry guests to the Stanford Court Hotel, where Steve Wozniak, then on EA’s board, spoke, a rock band played and arcade machines were set for free play. The first products shipped in May 1983. Amiga Computing reported that EA was “the 136th firm to enter the home computing field” when they did.

Software artists

EA’s early advertising ran under the line “We see farther.” Beside the “Can a computer make you cry?” text, the first advert showed the people who had made its first games, under the heading “Software artists?”: Bill Budge (Pinball Construction Set), Anne Westfall and Jon Freeman of Free Fall Associates (Archon and Murder on the Zinderneuf), Dan Bunten of Ozark Softscape (M.U.L.E.), and the authors of Hard Hat Mack, Axis Assassin and Worms?. Budge was quoted doubting the label: “I’m not so sure there are any software artists yet. We’ve got to earn that title.”

The idea came from the music business. Computer Gaming World described the early model as one where “artists worked on their own creative agendas, signed contracts for specific products and received technological and marketing assistance from the ‘studio’”, and noted that “even the album-jacketed products offered this subliminal suggestion”. Amiga World wrote in 1985 that EA’s structure “resembles that of a record company”, and made the point about credit directly: if you wondered who wrote your favourite program, “those questions will remain unanswered, unless you are looking at a program from Electronic Arts.” Each artist dealt with a producer, and each producer looked after about six artists. Amiga Computing explained the role in 1988: a producer, “just like his namesake in the film industry”, acted as “a buffer between the commercial interests of the company and the freedom of the programming team”. Later EA leaned on the film comparison instead; Hawkins called the games business “The New Hollywood”.

The artists were paid royalties. EA’s Jeff Johannigman told an online conference of Amiga programmers in December 1986 that royalties were “a % of the wholesale price of each unit sold”, and gave EA’s tests for a new game: it had to be “SIMPLE, HOT, and DEEP”, and have a “high concept”, something that could be described in one sentence. The last test had been learned “from great programs like MULE and Worms?”, which “didn’t sell very well because people didn’t understand what they were until AFTER they had bought and played with it.”

EA also published other studios’ games. Through the 1980s it distributed or published work from Interplay, whose The Bard’s Tale it sold, and from Lucasfilm Games and Dynamix, until Interplay and Lucasfilm moved to Activision in 1988. In 1985 EA claimed more than 60 product quality awards and 12 titles in the Billboard top 20.

The Amiga

EA backed the Commodore Amiga before it went on sale. Amiga World reported in 1985 that Commodore had “turned to Electronic Arts early this year” for programs to help sell the machine. Prototypes were scarce, “black boxes that do not resemble the off-white units found in retail stores”, so EA built an “artist’s workstation”: an IBM PC with a hard disk, a plug-in card and special software, worth $4,000 to $9,000, on which programmers wrote Amiga software and only moved to a real Amiga for the final stages. A programmer without one could have one supplied, its cost deducted from advances or royalties. “Ironically,” Amiga World observed, “the screen displays of a $9000 IBM PC AT (used in the artist’s workstation) have less graphical resolution than the weakest mode of the Amiga.” Hawkins had also installed an electronic messaging network that artists reached by modem from home: “We communicate electronically with our artists every day.” Through it they could reach a shared library of working Amiga code.

The best-known result was Deluxe Paint, written by Dan Silva. Ahoy! recalled in 1987 that it had been one of the first packages available for the Amiga 1000 and, unusually for software issued so early in a machine’s life, “a full-featured and effective graphics package”, so good that “in spite of several competing graphic products it became a best-seller among Amiga users”. EA’s other Amiga contribution lasted even longer. In 1985 it devised the Interchange File Format (IFF), a standard way of storing pictures, sounds, music and text so that different programs could share them, and Commodore-Amiga adopted it soon after the Amiga’s launch. By 1987 Amiga World reported that any Amiga program that did not support IFF would “instantly find itself subjected to an avalanche of criticism”.

The commitment paid. Johannigman said in December 1986 that EA had grown more than 100% that year and “made back our initial investment in Amiga development in the first three weeks that we shipped our first Amiga releases”.

Electronic Arts in Britain

For its first years in Britain, EA’s games carried someone else’s name. Ariolasoft, the software arm of a record company, launched in early 1985. Your Commodore filed the story under “Off the record”: two record companies, CBS and “Ariolasoft which is connected to Arista”, were entering software. Personal Computer Games reported that Ariolasoft’s first twelve games, all for the Commodore 64 and “originally written by Broderbund or Electronic Arts in the States”, included Hard Hat Mack, One-on-One and Realm of Impossibility, at £9.95 each. See When the Record Companies Sold Software.

In October 1987 Your Computer reported “Electronic Arts launches game in UK”. EA had set up its European headquarters in Langley, Berkshire, run by two Americans: Mark Lewis, Director of European Publishing, and the producer David Gardener (“EA likes to draw an analogy between itself and film companies”). It planned about a dozen releases a month until Christmas. The British boxes would not use “the much-imitated album-style covers used in the U.S.” but compact-disc-sized cases with yellow borders. The Deluxe programs, including Deluxe Paint, would cost £59 to £79, against £130 for imported copies. The company’s address on its adverts was 11–49 Station Road, Langley, near Slough.

Lewis explained the change to Amiga Computing in 1988. The Ariolasoft years had been “a good experience for a couple of years but we weren’t in touch with the consumers”, so EA decided to sell direct. By then it had three production staff in Britain overseeing conversions, and it had signed the Newcastle composer Rob Hubbard, who had given up his freelance work for a contract with EA.

The Mega Drive

EA’s move into consoles began without Sega’s permission. According to Hawkins, EA bought a Genesis, as the Mega Drive was called in America, in Japan so that it could study it, and reverse-engineered it so that it “did not technically need a license agreement to bring games to market”. In 1995 he named Steve Hayes, one of EA’s first two technical staff, as “the guy who reverse-engineered the Sega Genesis for EA”. Hawkins recalled in 2006 that Sega “huffed and puffed” but accepted that EA would go to market with or without a licence, and that this gave him “a lot of leverage in negotiating a reasonable license, which I did in 1990”. The terms were not published; the account of the negotiation comes from Hawkins himself. What the press reported at the time is the result: The One wrote in February 1991 that EA “enjoys a healthy relationship with Sega and has a licence with the Japanese company to manufacture its own cartridges”, and was planning around 20 Mega Drive releases that year, many of them conversions of its computer games. By September 1991 Zero reported that EA would also develop for Nintendo’s Super Famicom.

After the 1980s

Computer Gaming World counted 1989, when EA announced both a public share offering and its move into console games, as the year it “shook the entertainment software world”. In the 1990s it bought developers, among them Origin Systems in 1992 and Westwood Studios in 1998 for $122.5 million, and built its sports games, including Madden and FIFA, into series sold under the EA Sports name.

Larry Probst’s EA

When Hawkins left to run 3DO, the job went to Larry Probst, who had joined EA in 1984 as vice-president of sales and distribution. Edge profiled him in 1996 as “the boss of the biggest publisher of interactive entertainment in the world”, and noted the worry when Hawkins left “that with Hawkins would go the creative urge and entrepreneurial spirit that defined the company”. Probst, it decided, “may not be as colourful a character as his predecessor”, but EA was “still at the top of the tree”.

Much of that came from EA Sports, and its teams could move fast: Edge reported in 1994 that the Canadian team behind the Mega Drive FIFA Soccer had secretly spent two months building a mock 3DO version “just to see what they could do”, and that EA’s bosses, once they saw it running, gave them the go-ahead at once. Licences became the series’ strongest defence. In early 2005 Electronic Gaming Monthly reported that the National Football League and NFL Players Inc. had given EA the exclusive right, for five years, to make console and handheld games with real NFL teams, stadiums and players. It told readers not to wait for the reviews: “that choice has already been made for you.” Take-Two, copublisher of the cheaper ESPN NFL 2K series, called the deal “a tremendous disservice to the consumers”.

The FIFA licence, held for about 30 years, ended in 2022. That May EA announced that the partnership was over, and from 2023 the football series has been called EA Sports FC.

Buying and closing studios

EA bought developers throughout Probst’s time. Edge reported in 1997 that it had “recently purchased” Bullfrog and was buying Maxis, the makers of SimCity, in a $125 million share swap; Maxis had lost $1.7 million the year before and was finding it hard to survive as a small company on the stock market. For Will Wright the deal was a rescue. He told Edge in 2004 that inside Maxis it had been “a struggle to get one or two programmers” for the game that became The Sims: “we were kind of struggling until EA bought Maxis. They were really, really into it, and for the first time I got resources on the project.”

Other studios fared worse. Asked by Edge in 1999 whether Bullfrog had become creatively stifling under EA, its co-founder Les Edgar answered: “Of course it stifles certain types of creativity — all companies do.” EA closed Westwood Studios in 2003, and in February 2004 announced that it would shut Origin Systems in Austin, offering its staff severance or a move to California. Computer Gaming World wrote that year that Richard Garriott’s Origin was “dead and gone”. Looking back in 2010, Edge described “the EA of the ’90s, when studios like Bullfrog and Westwood were crudely assimilated into the group, often with disastrous results”.

The buying went on. In 2004 EA took over Criterion, the British developer of Burnout, and with it RenderWare, the development tools that Grand Theft Auto, Tony Hawk’s and Pro Evolution Soccer were built with. Edge pointed out that those rival games were “now dependent on intellectual property owned by their biggest rival”. By 2006, Edge reported, EA had “both of its hands on” DICE, the Swedish makers of Battlefield.

EA Spouse

In late 2004 an anonymous blog post put EA at the centre of an argument about working hours in games. Its author, signing herself “EA Spouse”, described the hours her partner was working at EA. Edge reported that EA’s mandatory “crunch” policy, “at its most extreme, requires an 85-hour working week”, and that the post had drawn a “swell of support from developers, including current and ex-EA staff”. Electronic Gaming Monthly linked it to a class action already under way in which an EA animator was suing for unpaid overtime.

The lawsuits cost EA money and changed its rules. In October 2005 it agreed to pay $15.6 million to settle the claim brought for about 200 entry-level graphic artists, who became eligible for overtime pay, and in 2006 it paid $14.9 million to settle a similar claim by its programmers. The San Jose Mercury News later identified EA Spouse as Erin Hoffman, whose fiancé, the EA programmer Leander Hasty, was one of the plaintiffs. In 2010 Edge wrote that the affair had “turned the company into a symbol of the game industry’s gruelling crunch culture”.

Riccitiello, Wilson and Respawn

Probst stepped down as chief executive in 2007 and stayed on as executive chairman. His successor, John Riccitiello, was a former EA president who had left to set up the investment firm Elevation Partners, whose first investment, Edge noted, had combined BioWare and Pandemic Studios. In October 2007 EA agreed to buy them both, paying up to $620 million in cash and up to $155 million more in shares; “I’m glad to be working with them again,” Riccitiello said. BioWare had made Baldur’s Gate and was about to release Mass Effect.

EA also went after new kinds of player. It bought the mobile publisher Jamdat and the Facebook games maker Playfish, which even Hawkins, asked by Edge in 2010, gave it credit for: “EA used its size and strategic leverage to acquire Jamdat and then Playfish.” He still doubted it could keep up: “just starting to make some products in one studio isn’t the answer.”

Riccitiello resigned on 18 March 2013, two weeks after the launch of an always-online SimCity that many players could not connect to. Edge judged that the resignation “had more to do with EA’s struggling stock price and a weak financial forecast”. Andrew Wilson became chief executive later that year. Two years later EA closed Maxis’s Emeryville studio, where SimCity and Spore had been made, and moved Maxis’s work to its other studios; in 2017 it closed Visceral Games, the makers of Dead Space.

In 2017 EA also bought Respawn Entertainment, the studio Jason West and Vince Zampella had set up with EA’s backing after Activision fired them in 2010. When EA reorganised itself in June 2023 into two groups, EA Sports and EA Entertainment, Zampella was still leading Respawn.

Codemasters and a private EA

One British name from the 8-bit years came into EA late. In December 2020, Wireframe reported, EA outbid Take-Two for Codemasters, offering about £1 billion. Readers’ letters in the same issue were uneasy. One, who had bought Codemasters’ £1.99 Spectrum games, “had to sit down” when he read the price; another hoped the company would not “go the way of, say, Bullfrog or Black Box, which were acquired and later quietly shuttered”. EA completed the purchase on 18 February 2021, at an enterprise value of $1.2 billion.

In February 2024 EA cut about 670 jobs, 5% of its staff, and said it would move away from making games based on licensed properties it did not think would succeed. On 29 September 2025 it agreed to be bought by a consortium of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the private equity firm Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, for $210 a share, an enterprise value of about $55 billion; the announcement called it “the largest all-cash sponsor take-private investment in history”. The deal closed on 4 August 2026. EA’s shares stopped trading, the company stayed in Redwood City, and Wilson stayed as chairman and chief executive.

Sources

Electronic Arts advertisement, “Can a computer make you cry?”, Antic vol. 2 no. 3, June 1983: the text quoted, “We see farther”, “Software artists?” and the developers pictured.
Computer Gaming World issue 88, November 1991, industry history, pp. 20–26: “Amazing Software”; the Applefest party; Hawkins at Apple; the recording-industry model and album-jacketed products; the New Hollywood; EA’s affiliated developers and their moves in 1988; 1989.
Amiga Computing vol. 1 no. 2, July 1988, feature on Electronic Arts: Hawkins’s background; Tim Mott and Dave Evans; the founding in 1982 and first products in May 1983; “the 136th firm”; the producer role; Rob Hubbard’s contract; Mark Lewis on Ariolasoft and selling direct; the British production staff.
Trip Hawkins, interviewed in Edge issue 26, November 1995, pp. 56–57: his co-founders; Steve Hayes and the Genesis.
Jim Forbes, “Stimulating Simulations: Electronic Arts Gets Involved with the Amiga”, AmigaWorld vol. 1 no. 1, 1985, pp. 55–60: credit for programmers; the record-company structure; producers; Commodore’s approach; the artist’s workstation; the messaging network.
Electronic Arts advertisement, “Why Electronic Arts is committed to the Amiga”, AmigaWorld vol. 1 no. 1, 1985: 60 awards and 12 Billboard top-20 titles.
AmigaForum conference of 10 December 1986, Amazing Computing vol. 2 no. 10, October 1987, pp. 88–96: Jeff Johannigman on royalties, EA’s criteria, M.U.L.E. and Worms?, and the return on Amiga development.
Ahoy! issue 41, May 1987: review of Deluxe Paint II.
ACE issue 22, July 1989: Dan Silva as author of Deluxe Paint III.
“Interchange File Format”, AmigaWorld special issue, 1987, p. 23: EA’s IFF standard of 1985 and its adoption by Commodore-Amiga.
Your Commodore vol. 1 no. 5, February 1985, “Off the record”: Ariolasoft’s launch.
Personal Computer Games issue 15, February 1985: Ariolasoft’s first twelve games.
Your Computer, October 1987, p. 7: “Electronic Arts launches game in UK”; the British packaging and prices; the Langley address.
Ken Horowitz, “Interview: Trip Hawkins”, Sega-16, 18 August 2006 (web, secondary; Hawkins’s recollection): the reverse-engineering strategy and the 1990 licence. https://www.sega-16.com/2006/08/interview-trip-hawkins/
The One issue 29, February 1991: EA’s licence to make its own Mega Drive cartridges.
Zero issue 23, September 1991: EA to develop for the Super Famicom.
Australian Commodore and Amiga Review vol. 9 no. 11, November 1992, “EA Acquires Origin”; Computer Gaming World issue 172, November 1998, “EA Acquires Westwood For $122.5M”.
Wikipedia, “Electronic Arts” (web, secondary): the EA Sports label; Andrew Wilson as chief executive from 2013. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts
Edge issue 30, March 1996, profile of Larry Probst: his career at EA, promotion in 1991 and standing.
Edge issue 7, April 1994: the secret 3DO version of FIFA Soccer.
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 189, March 2005, “Only Game in Town”: the NFL exclusive licence and Take-Two’s response.
“EA blows the final whistle on 30-year FIFA partnership”, TechRadar, 10 May 2022 (web, secondary): the end of the FIFA licence and the EA Sports FC name. https://www.techradar.com/news/ea-blows-the-final-whistle-on-30-year-fifa-partnership
Edge issue 47, July 1997, news, “EA acquires Sim kings”: the Maxis deal, Maxis’s losses and EA’s purchase of Bullfrog.
Will Wright interviewed in Edge issue 143, December 2004, p. 24.
Les Edgar interviewed in Edge issue 74, August 1999.
Edge issue 121, March 2003, letters: Westwood “now been dissolved”.
“EA to Close Origin Systems”, Game Developer, 24 February 2004 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/ea-to-close-origin-systems
Computer Gaming World issue 243, October 2004, Hall of Fame: Richard Garriott and Origin.
Edge issue 219, October 2010, feature on EA: “crudely assimilated”; EA Spouse as a symbol of crunch; Trip Hawkins on Jamdat and Playfish.
Edge issue 141, October 2004, “frontend”: EA’s takeover of Criterion and RenderWare.
Edge issue 162, May 2006: EA and DICE.
Edge issue 144, Christmas 2004, news, “EA spouse speaks out”.
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 188, February 2005: EA Spouse and the overtime class action.
“Electronic Arts settles class-action lawsuit”, NBC News, 6 October 2005 (web, secondary): the $15.6 million settlement with graphic artists. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna9611229
“Programmers Win EA Overtime Settlement, EA_Spouse Revealed”, Game Developer, 2006 (web, secondary): the $14.9 million programmers’ settlement; the San Jose Mercury News identification of Erin Hoffman. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/programmers-win-ea-overtime-settlement-ea_spouse-revealed
Edge issue 174, April 2007, news, “EA swaps heads”: Probst, Riccitiello and Elevation Partners.
Electronic Arts, “EA to Acquire BioWare Corp. and Pandemic Studios”, press release, 11 October 2007, filed with the SEC (public record). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000712515/000119312507216933/dex991.htm
Edge issue 253, May 2013: Riccitiello’s resignation and SimCity.
“EA Shuts Down SimCity Developer Maxis”, Kotaku, 4 March 2015 (web, secondary). https://kotaku.com/ea-shuts-down-simcity-developer-maxis-1689454903
“EA shuts down the studio behind ‘Dead Space’”, Engadget, 17 October 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.engadget.com/2017-10-17-ea-shuts-down-visceral-games.html
Electronic Arts, “EA Completes Acquisition of Respawn”, 1 December 2017 (web, secondary). https://www.ea.com/news/ea-completes-acquisition-of-respawn
Anthony McCartney, “Activision, EA settle lawsuit over execs’ leaving”, Associated Press, 17 May 2012 (web, secondary): Respawn formed to make games for EA. https://phys.org/news/2012-05-activision-ea-lawsuit-execs.html
“EA Entertainment and EA Sports: what Electronic Arts’ restructuring means”, Game World Observer, 21 June 2023 (web, secondary). https://gameworldobserver.com/2023/06/21/ea-entertainment-ea-sports-restructuring-electronic-arts
Wireframe issue 46, December 2020: news, “Cod-EA-s”, and readers’ letters on the Codemasters bid.
Electronic Arts, “Electronic Arts and Codemasters Establish a New Global Powerhouse for Racing Videogames & Entertainment”, press release, 18 February 2021, filed with the SEC (public record). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/712515/000071251521000028/a991pressrelease1.htm
“Video game company EA to lay off 5% of workforce”, NBC News, 28 February 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/video-games/video-game-company-ea-lay-5-workforce-670-employees-rcna141052
Electronic Arts, press release on the agreement to be acquired by PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, 29 September 2025, filed with the SEC (public record). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/712515/000114036125036415/ef20056167_ex99-1.htm
Electronic Arts, “EA Announces Completion of Acquisition by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners”, 4 August 2026 (web, secondary). https://www.ea.com/news/ea-announces-completion-of-acquisition