Founder / CEO · Electronic Arts · b. 1953 · 1982–1994
Trip Hawkins founded Electronic Arts in 1982 with the radical proposition that game developers deserved public credit and royalties like musicians, creating the first third-party publisher to treat software authors as artists and building it into the world's largest game company.
Hawkins graduated from Harvard with a degree in strategy and applied game theory, then worked at Apple in marketing strategy before leaving in 1982 to found Electronic Arts. His founding concept was explicit and unusual for its time: game developers were creative artists whose names and faces should appear on packaging just as musicians appeared on album covers. The first EA catalogue was designed in record-sleeve format, with developer photographs and biographical notes on the back — a deliberate statement of values that attracted talent who felt overlooked by the anonymous factory-model of Atari and other publishers. Hawkins's strategic instincts shaped EA's first decade: he identified sports simulation as an underserved market and championed John Madden Football, which Madden himself refused to approve until the simulation was genuinely accurate. He oversaw EA's aggressive acquisition of development studios in the late 1980s and early 1990s, building a portfolio that included Origin Systems (Ultima), Bullfrog (Theme Park, Dungeon Keeper), and Westwood (Command & Conquer). He left EA in 1994 to found 3DO Company, which produced the ill-fated 3DO Interactive Multiplayer console — an expensive open-platform system that never achieved the market penetration required to make its high per-unit cost viable. The 3DO failed commercially, but Hawkins's earlier work at EA had permanently altered the games industry's relationship with its developers.