The founding idea
Trip Hawkins graduated from Harvard in 1976 with a degree in strategy and applied mathematics, took an MBA from Stanford, and worked in product marketing at Apple. He arrived at Apple early enough to absorb the company's founding culture — the belief that technology products could be designed for people rather than for engineers, that the person using the software mattered as much as the person writing it. He left Apple in 1982 to found Electronic Arts.
The founding premise of EA was unusual for the period. Hawkins believed that the people who made games deserved recognition comparable to musicians, filmmakers, and other creative professionals — that game development was an art form in a medium young enough not to have established the conventions that recognised it as one. The company's first marketing campaign, "We See Farther," launched in 1983 with advertisements that looked like album covers: photographs of game developers treated as artists, with names prominently displayed and short biographical statements about their work. The copy positioned game development as a creative profession, and EA's role as a label that sought out and supported creative talent.
The practical consequence of this positioning was that EA recruited differently than other software publishers. They looked for people with strong creative identities and design convictions, not just technical proficiency. They paid competitive advances and offered royalties — arrangements that were not standard in an industry where most publishers treated developers as work-for-hire. The first EA titles — Pinball Construction Set, Hard Hat Mack, Archon — had named creators on the box. The developers were the product.
Sports games and John Madden
EA's move into sports games was not initially obvious as a strategic direction. Sports games existed in 1983 — simple titles that simulated football or baseball at a level of abstraction that bore limited relationship to the actual experience of the sport. Hawkins's insight was that sports games could be made that felt like the sport — that the simulation fidelity could be high enough to make the game interesting to actual sports fans, not just casual players looking for a quick distraction.
He approached John Madden — then the most prominent NFL analyst on American television — about putting his name on a football game. Madden agreed, with a condition: the game had to be accurate. When EA's initial design included seven players per side rather than eleven to simplify the game's complexity, Madden refused to endorse it. Eleven players per side, or nothing. The development team rebuilt the game around eleven-per-side football. John Madden Football launched in 1988 on Apple II and DOS, and immediately demonstrated that simulation fidelity was commercially viable: players who understood real football recognized the game as a serious attempt to simulate it, and that recognition translated to purchase decisions.
The Madden franchise grew to define EA's business more than any other single product. When EA secured the exclusive NFL Players Association license in 2004, they eliminated competition in officially licensed NFL simulation games entirely. The business model — exclusive license, annual update, iterating roster and rules rather than rebuilding the game — was stable, profitable, and self-reinforcing. The Madden franchise has generated over $4 billion in revenue over its lifetime. It also became a symbol of how EA's founding principles — creative artists making original work — had given way to something different: a franchise business optimised for recurring revenue.
The 3DO and the fall
Hawkins left EA in 1991 to found the 3DO Company — his attempt to build a gaming platform that would function as an open standard, licensed to multiple hardware manufacturers rather than controlled by a single company. The vision was technically coherent: an open hardware specification, licensable to any electronics manufacturer, with a software royalty model that would fund the platform without requiring 3DO to manufacture hardware directly. The business model was analogous to how VHS had beaten Betamax — broad licensing creating rapid market penetration.
The problem was price. The 3DO launched in October 1993 at $699. At a time when the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis sold for $99 and $149 respectively, $699 positioned the 3DO as a premium device for enthusiasts willing to pay for next-generation technology. The enthusiasts existed — approximately 700,000 3DO units sold — but not in numbers that attracted the third-party publisher support required to build a software library. Without a software library, the $699 price point couldn't be justified to mainstream consumers. Without mainstream consumers, the software library didn't grow.
The 3DO failed before Sony's PlayStation and Sega's Saturn launched in 1994 and 1995, demonstrating that the 32-bit console market was viable at the right price point. 3DO's failure was not a failure of the underlying technical premise — the hardware was competitive — but a failure to solve the distribution and pricing problems that open hardware standards face when they compete with closed platforms. Hawkins founded Digital Chocolate in 2003 and worked on mobile games through the 2000s. EA grew, under subsequent management, into the largest game publisher in the world. The company Hawkins founded on the principle that creative artists should be recognised became the company most often associated with the industrialisation of game development. The distance between those two things is the history of the industry in a single story.