Part 2 of Retro Gamer's exhaustive lookback at the mighty EA

As the Eighties began to fade, gaming had started to fragment. As a term, videogame didn’t cut it any more; the still embryonic industry was an eclectic mix of subsets: arcade games, home computer games and console games. Within this set were the genres that are still with us today, from sports, RPGs, shoot-’em-ups, puzzlers and platformers, through to beat-’emups and the RTE laser-disk games that populated gamers consciousness.

The heartbeat that drove this was a diverse collection of companies, run by industry veterans who had made their money from the games that they’d produced in the halcyon 8-bit days. The unstable years ahead would see many of these companies fail to adapt to the demands of a new gaming world and eventually close after incurring massive losses, largely because the guys at the top should never have been there; a great programmer is rarely a good businessman. Fortunately for Electronic Arts, it had Trip Hawkins. A shrewd operator, Trip has always had a feel for the next big thing, and this time around he had a company that was going to be a part of it.

Sega by now had given up on the Master System, having failed to dent the NES user base. Atari and Commodore as always were in a world of two, still convinced that their only competitors were each other, despite each companies ever-diminishing sales figures. Trip needed to plan the next few years for EA, but in such a fragmented market it was going to be expensive to develop for so many formats.

Trip explains this tumultuous period, saying, “Nintendo was a visionary and innovative company, and very principled about what they did and how and why they did it. Stubborn to a fault. Sega would basically copy Nintendo, but without any of the same convictions. Sega took advantage when Nintendo rested on their 8-bit laurels.” As a footnote to this, way back in 1984 Trip had turned down the opportunity to become a Nintendo licensee, the terms offered weren’t very different from the deal that Nintendo brokered to bring Rare on board. For Trip and EA though, it wasn’t enough.

The problem Trip had was that there were really only two established 16-bit systems of note in the West, and he believed in neither. While the Amiga was doing well, Commodore‘s future plans for the system were lacklustre to say the least. Trip had always had an apathy for Atari since his days at Apple, and to date he blames Atari’s management strategy as being largely responsible for the videogame crash of the Eighties, so the ST was never seen as viable by EA. Technology was always the combustion inside EA, and with Nintendo standing firm with the NES and stating that it was in no rush to deliver a 16-bit machine, Sega and its soon to be released Mega Drive seemed to be Trip’s only outlet.

… continued