Retro Gamer interviews Trip Hawkins for its retrospective on the mighty EA

Get past the casual consumer and you�ll find an apathy for EA equal to the love for Nintendo. A good analogy for this would be The Life Of Brian’s, “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Now replace Romans with Electronic Arts and answer honestly, try to imagine gaming without EA, it would be a travesty. EA is more important to gaming than Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft because if it wasn’t there, nobody else would be, at least, not on the same scale. Electronic Art’s reach is as expansive as it is veiled; its grasp of present and futuregeneration technologies is unrivalled and at its heart beats the greatest game development roster in the world.

EA was the realisation of a seven-year ideal held by its founder Trip Hawkins. Trip demonstrates this ideal when he tells us, “I grew up in the golden age of TV. From the moment I saw my first computer in 1972, I knew I wanted to make videogames. I loved to play and had a strong feeling that it was good for me and that people were meant to interact, not sit passively in front of the ‘boob tube’. I was already designing board games, but saw that a computer would allow me to put ‘real life in a box,’ a phrase which was oft repeated by the press in the early EA days.”

He continues, “In 1975 I learned that the first retail store dedicated to computers had opened and that Intel was going to put a computer on a chip. I decided that I should start my own videogame software company in 1982. By then, I figured, there would be enough hardware in homes to support a game software company. But I had some things I needed to do first: finish school, learn how to make computer software, learn how to run a business, and help sell some hardware into homes so that my software could have some customers.” For many, such precociousness is left behind as childhood dreams find themselves juxtaposed to harsh realities of teenage years, but Trip fashioned a journey through life that would see him realise his goals. “In the intervening seven years, I customised my Harvard studies and graduated magna cum laude with the first ‘videogame’ degree,” he explains. “Formally it was called a degree in Strategy and Applied Game Theory. But I was programming videogames. One of my first was a 1973 football simulation written in BASIC for a PDP-11 mini-computer with time-sharing video displays, foreshadowing Madden and EA Sports. I then got an MBA at Stanford while writing the first major market research study of the Personal Computer, attending the first West Coast Computer Faire, and also doing research for Fairchild on the Channel F, the first console. I went to work at Apple in 1978 and helped grow the company from $2 million in revenue to $1 billion and from 50 employees to 4,000 in four years.”

… continued

Trip Hawkins - Where is he now?

Outspoken and slightly egocentric, there is just no denying that Trip Hawkins is a genius. In a remarkable interview with Crash in 1986 he described a future for gaming that was almost impossible to imagine. The fact that everything he said has happened since, just illustrates the understanding that he has for the gaming industry.

When the director of product marketing leaves Apple for a startup, and then sees his new start-up turn in over a million dollars per annum, you may be forgiven for thinking that would be it. But from EA Trip moved on to 3DO, describing this as “a gradual accident. I intended 3DO to be a sister company and to remain involved with both, but they evolved on separate arcs and I felt obligated to keep 3DO alive. By the time it became necessary to split, of course it was difficult, like choosing between a healthy teenage son and a baby that was in surgery.” He would remain at 3DO until the company finally filed for bankruptcy in 2003. Since then Trip has formed a new company called Digital Chocolate, when asked to compare his new venture with his old, he tells us, “I’ve been far more successful as an international business with Digital Chocolate. Digital Chocolate even does something I never thought possible at EA – we make the highest quality mobile games but we do a lot of the work in places like Finland and India.” And for Trip, who recently celebrated Digital Chocolate’s 3,000,000th download, the future is clear, “The mobile phone has turned into ‘The Social Computer’. Mobile phones are becoming ubiquitous computers that keep people connected to their virtual villages. I founded Digital Chocolate to help people get more out of their social lives and mobile lifestyles using these computer networks.” The future’s bright, the future’s…