Trip Hawkins | Code Like It's 198x

“Can a computer make you cry?” asked the first advertisement for Electronic Arts, and Trip Hawkins built a company around the question. He believed the people who wrote games deserved to be treated like authors and musicians: named on the box, photographed in the adverts, paid royalties and given a producer. By 1993, Edge reported, EA was the world’s biggest third-party games publisher. Hawkins then tried something harder: a games console that any manufacturer could build under licence.

Fast facts

Full name: William M. Hawkins, known as Trip.
Born: 1953, and grew up in Southern California.
Education: Harvard, in a subject he designed himself, strategy and applied game theory; MBA from Stanford.
Apple: marketing roles in the Apple II and Lisa divisions, ending as director of marketing for the Lisa.
Electronic Arts: founded 1982; first products shipped May 1983. Still EA’s chairman in 1991.
The 3DO Company: established September 1991; its first console, made by Panasonic, went on sale in the United States in 1993 at $699. The company sold its M2 hardware to Matsushita in 1995 for $100 million and filed for bankruptcy in 2003.
Later companies: Digital Chocolate (mobile and social games), founded 2003, chief executive until 2012; If You Can (learning games for children), from 2012.

A games major at Harvard

Games came first. AmigaWorld reported in 1985 that Hawkins had started his first games company at 12, growing up in Southern California. At Harvard he talked the university into letting him combine statistics and psychology into what the magazine called “a games major”; Compute! later gave his degree as “strategy and applied game theory”. He went on to an MBA at Stanford and then joined Apple while it was still small.

He spent four to five years at Apple, in marketing jobs in the Apple II and Lisa divisions, finishing as director of marketing for the Lisa. The job put him in touch with programmers, and it shows in one early story. When Joel Billings and John Lyon of SSI were planning Computer Bismarck on a Northstar computer, Computer Gaming World recorded, Hawkins, “then a marketing executive at Apple”, persuaded them that the Apple II “had better graphics potential and would reach more customers”.

Software artists

Hawkins left Apple in 1982 to found the company that was, according to Computer Gaming World, “originally slated to be ‘Amazing Software’”. CRASH reported that he started it with two million dollars. He recalled in 1995 that “there were about 10 other people who I considered to be my co-founders”, hired before the company had a real office; among them were Joe Ybarra, EA’s first producer, and Steve Hayes, one of its first two technical staff.

He described EA’s mission to AmigaWorld in 1985 in one line: “We want to make software that makes computers worth owning. We’re dedicated to finding software artists and helping them to do their best work.” The first advertisements put that into practice, with photographs of Bill Budge, Dan Bunten, Anne Westfall, Jon Freeman and others under the heading “Software artists?”. Computer Gaming World described the early model as borrowed from the record business, 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”. Later Hawkins switched metaphors, and called the games business “The New Hollywood”.

Asked by AmigaWorld whether he was a hero to software authors, he answered: “If I can help them to make money, I am.” When CRASH met him at the 1987 PCW Show, he was arguing that games had to grow up: “The subject matter of software must be more suitable for adults.”

How EA backed the Amiga, sold its games in Britain and reverse-engineered Sega’s Mega Drive is told in Electronic Arts. Hawkins named Steve Hayes as “the guy who reverse-engineered the Sega Genesis for EA”; the account of the licence negotiation that followed comes from Hawkins himself, in a 2006 interview.

The 3DO

By the early 1990s, Edge reported, Hawkins had become frustrated by having to develop for as many as 20 different formats, and by “the restrictive practices of the console giants Nintendo and Sega”. His answer was a single standard for interactive hardware, designed by one company and licensed to anyone who wanted to make it.

The hardware came from RJ Mical and Dave Needle, who had worked on the Amiga and the handheld that became the Atari Lynx. 3DO Magazine reported that their new design was fostered by David Morse’s New Technologies Group, with Hawkins “first on board”, and that The 3DO Company was established in September 1991. The 3DO Company designed the machine and licensed it; Panasonic built the first console, and GoldStar followed. In December 1993 Amazing Computing found the Panasonic unit on sale for $699, with, the shop admitted, one game: “The one that comes with it.”

In 1995 Hawkins told Edge that the installed base had grown fivefold in a year and that more than 220 titles were available, against about 50 a year earlier. Later that year The 3DO Company sold its next-generation M2 technology to Matsushita for $100 million, and turned to making software. It filed for bankruptcy in 2003.

Digital Chocolate

Hawkins went straight back into games, this time on mobile phones. In 2004, a year after 3DO’s bankruptcy, he was running a new studio called Digital Chocolate and told Computer Gaming World’s wireless supplement that phones reminded him of EA’s beginnings: “When I founded EA, there were over 100 small game publishers in a cottage industry. Technology was very primitive, and development costs were low.” He explained the name as he might have explained Electronic Arts: words like “apple”, “art” and “chocolate” had “a lot of emotional brand value”, and a mobile player was someone with a slice of time for “a digital snack. Chocolate is the champagne of snacks!”

By 2011 he was arguing that the console business was heading the wrong way. At the Gamelab conference in Barcelona that June he gave a talk called “The Browser Will Win”, and he told Edge that his own children had shown him why. His teenage son had gone from playing “hardcore games on consoles” to using the console only for Guitar Hero and Wii Sports, and then to playing everything on an iPhone and in a laptop browser: “He cared more about the social aspect of it.” Later that year he told Edge that free-to-play would be “the default position for the entire game industry, apart from the highest-end franchises”.

Teaching games

Hawkins stepped down as Digital Chocolate’s chief executive in 2012 to concentrate on a new company, If You Can. Its first game, IF…, released for the iPad in 2014, was an adventure for children set in a town called Greenberry, designed to teach what educators call social and emotional learning: managing emotions, sticking at problems, making decisions and empathy. “We learn by doing,” Hawkins told Fortune, “and gameplaying is a fundamentally potent way to learn if you’re put into a situation that can be transferred into the real world.” In February 2014 the company raised $6.5 million from investors led by Greylock Partners.

The collapse of 3DO also followed him personally. A 2014 ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sets out the story: from 1994 Hawkins had sold large amounts of his EA stock to invest in 3DO, and had used tax shelters recommended by his accountants to offset the gains. The Internal Revenue Service disallowed them, and he lent 3DO about $12 million before it failed. In 2006 he and his wife filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Internal Revenue Service had assessed him for $21 million in taxes, penalties and interest, and California’s Franchise Tax Board for $15.3 million, and both argued that the debts could not be written off because he had wilfully tried to evade them. The bankruptcy court agreed with them, but in September 2014 the Ninth Circuit ruled that the government had to prove a specific intent to evade tax, not merely that he had gone on spending, and sent the case back to be decided again.

In 2015 Hawkins moved to Santa Barbara, where he became an adviser to UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Digital Games Research and planned a consulting business to help start-up founders: “I know a lot about what these guys are going through.” He taught entrepreneurship and leadership at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 2016 to 2019.

Sources

Jim Forbes, “A Talk with Trip”, AmigaWorld vol. 1 no. 1, 1985, p. 61: his first games company, Harvard, the MBA, Apple and the Lisa, EA’s mission and “If I can help them to make money”.
Compute! vol. 10 no. 6 (issue 97), June 1988: his degrees and his roles at Apple.
CRASH issue 46, November 1987, interview by Barnaby Page: two million dollars; games for adults.
Computer Gaming World issue 88, November 1991, pp. 20–26: Hawkins and Computer Bismarck; “Amazing Software”; the recording-industry model and “The New Hollywood”; his role as EA’s chairman.
Electronic Arts advertisement, “Can a computer make you cry?”, Antic vol. 2 no. 3, June 1983.
Amiga Computing vol. 1 no. 2, July 1988: his full name; EA’s first products shipped in May 1983.
Trip Hawkins, interviewed in Edge issue 26, November 1995, pp. 56–57: his co-founders; Steve Hayes and the Genesis; the growth of 3DO.
“Welcome to 3DO”, supplement to Edge issue 12, September 1994: his Harvard degree; EA as the biggest third-party publisher by 1993; his frustration with formats and licences; the 3DO standard.
3DO Magazine issue 1, 1995: Mical, Needle, Morse and the New Technologies Group; The 3DO Company established September 1991.
Amazing Computing vol. 8 no. 12, December 1993: the Panasonic console at $699.
Edge issue 28, January 1996; Computer & Video Games issue 170, January 1996: the sale of the M2 technology to Matsushita for $100 million.
Retro Gamer issue 28, 2006: 3DO’s move to software and bankruptcy in 2003.
Ken Horowitz, “Interview: Trip Hawkins”, Sega-16, 18 August 2006 (web, secondary; Hawkins’s recollection): the Genesis licence. https://www.sega-16.com/2006/08/interview-trip-hawkins/
“Wireless Guide”, supplement to Computer Gaming World issue 239, June 2004: interview with Hawkins about Digital Chocolate.
Edge issue 231, September 2011, “Browser’s inside story”, p. 14: Gamelab, his son’s playing habits, and his career from Apple to Digital Chocolate.
Edge issue 234, December 2011, feature on free-to-play: Hawkins on free-to-play as the default.
John Gaudiosi, “EA founder Trip Hawkins’s latest chapter: education”, Fortune, 3 January 2014 (web, secondary): leaving Digital Chocolate in 2012, If You Can and IF…. https://fortune.com/2014/01/03/ea-founder-trip-hawkinss-latest-chapter-education
Leena Rao, “EA Founder Raises $6.5M From Greylock For Social And Emotional Learning Game ‘If You Can’”, TechCrunch, 26 February 2014 (web, secondary). https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/26/ea-founder-raises-6-5m-from-greylock-for-social-and-emotional-learning-game-if-you-can
Hawkins v. Franchise Tax Board of California, No. 11-16276, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, opinion of 15 September 2014 (public record): the EA share sales, the tax shelters, the loans to 3DO, the 2006 bankruptcy and the ruling. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2014/09/15/11-16276.pdf
“Hawkins v. Franchise Tax Board: The Ninth Circuit’s Realistic Interpretation of ‘Willful Evasion’”, Restructuring GlobalView, November 2014 (web, secondary): the Chapter 11 case, the $21 million and $15.3 million assessments, the tax shelters and the ruling. https://www.restructuring-globalview.com/2014/11/hawkins-v-franchise-tax-board-the-ninth-circuit-gets-one-right/
Gina Potthoff, “EA Games Founder Trip Hawkins Sets His Sights on Helping Entrepreneurs”, Noozhawk, 12 May 2015 (web, secondary). https://www.noozhawk.com/ea_games_founder_sets_sights_on_helping_entrepreneurs/
Wikipedia, “Trip Hawkins” (web, secondary): his teaching at UC Santa Barbara, 2016–2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trip_Hawkins