Author Archives: David Mullich
How Game Publisher Electronic Arts Got Started
A user of the question-and-answer site Quora recently asked me how the game publisher Electronic Arts its start. Although I’ve never worked directly for Electronic Arts, I was co-owner of a company, Electric Transit, that was Electronic Arts’ first affiliated label publisher, and I did work for EA founder Trip Hawkins later as one of his employees at The 3DO Company. So, I figured that gave me enough expertise to answer the question, and here is the answer I gave.
Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins got the idea to start a company publishing computer games while he was a student at Stanford University in 1977. He told his idea to like-minded fellow Stanford student Bing Gordon but estimated that the home computer market wouldn’t be large enough to make such a company viable for another five years.
Sure enough, in February 1982, Trip Hawkins arranged a meeting with Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital to discuss financing his new venture, which he called Amazing Software. Valentine encouraged Hawkins to leave his position as Director of Marketing & Strategy at Apple Computer and allowed Hawkins use of Sequoia Capital’s spare office space to start the company.
On May 28, Trip Hawkins incorporated and established the company with a personal investment of an estimated $200,000. Seven months later in December, Hawkins secured $2 million of venture capital from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sevin Rosen Funds.
For more than seven months, Hawkins refined his business plan. With aid from his first employee (with whom he worked in marketing at Apple), Rich Melmon, the original plan was written, mostly by Hawkins, on an Apple II in Sequoia Capital’s office in August 1982. During that time, Hawkins also employed two of his former staff from Apple, Dave Evans and Pat Marriott, as producers, and a Stanford MBA classmate, Jeff Burton from Atari for international business development. The business plan was again refined in September and reissued on October 8, 1982
Between September and November, employee headcount rose to 11, including Tim Mott, David Maynard, Steve Hayes, and his friend from Stanford, Bing Gordon, whom he brought on as Chief Creative Officer
Having outgrown the office space provided by Sequoia Capital, the company relocated to a San Mateo office that overlooked the San Francisco Airport landing path. Headcount rose rapidly in 1983, including employees from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and Hawkins got Apple’s Steve Wozniak to agree to sit on the board of directors.
After deciding that “Amazing Software” was too pretentious a name for the company, the employees held a meeting that lasted late into the night to come up with a new name, and they selected “Electronic Arts.”
Hawkins wanted to treat software as an art form and called his developers, “software artists.” He decided to model his publishing company after the music publishing industry, and so contracted music producers to instruct his game producers — including Don Daglow, Richard Hilleman, Stewart Bonn, David Gardner, and Nancy Fong — in how to recruit, work with, and promote talent. Electronic Arts game its game developers in its marketing and packaging materials, and modeled its packaging after album covers because Hawkins thought that a record album style would both save costs and convey an artistic feeling.
Years later, as I was driving him to the airport when we were both at The 3DO Company, Hawkins told me about how he was the inventor of the term “producer” for the liaison between a game publisher and a game studio, as well as the term “director” for the person who directly manages the development team. And as much as he promoted the concept of game developers as artists, he told me that every game ever made originated from one of his ideas. I don’t know if he was kidding me or not, but true story!
Electronic Arts, or “EA” as the company was also known, quickly became the biggest game publisher, and has maintained it dominance in the industry for 35 years, even after the departure of Hawkins in 1991 to head up The 3DO Company, as well as Bing Gordon and many of its original executive and producers. As many success stories as there have been in Silicon Valley, Trip Hawkins’ original success with Electronic Arts has to rank as among the greatest.
A Game Designer Is Not The Same Thing As A Game Artist
There seems to be a common misconception that a game designer is the same thing as a game artist. Students and wannabe game developers have told me that want to be a game designer and create all the concept artwork for a game — or, alternately, they are concerned that about not much skilled in drawing. Apparently, they have the perception that a game designer’s come up with an idea for a game, draws a lot of sketches about how that game should look, and then passes those sketches off to someone else to do while waiting for their royalty checks to roll in.
That fact is that game designers do not need to be very good at drawing. At most, a typical game designer may sketch out the structure of the game’s menu, the placement of buttons and other user interface elements on a screen, or the layout of a level. However, there are many good tools that can assist you in these tasks.
Writing is a far more valuable skill for a game designer to have, as well as the drive to work hard throughout the game’s development.
These are the main tasks of a game designer:
- Take a game idea (the idea may be someone else’s, such as the manager of a studio or a producer at a publisher) and work out all the details that make it a complete design: goals, obstacles, resources, rules, controls, story, and so on. For a large-scale game, this means creating one or multiple game design documents that are hundreds of pages long, full of tables, formulas, and diagrams explaining how the game will work in sufficient detail that all the programmers, artists, and sound engineers can figure out what their tasks are.
- Possibly create a rough paper or digital prototype of the game to test and nail down the rules and other game elements before it goes on to the development team.
- Conduct playtest sessions with groups of playtesters, record their reactions to the game, analyze the results, and make necessary modifications to the design that will create the experience they were trying to create.
The task of creating sketches for a game’s characters, objects, and environments is that of a concept artist. Some game designers are also concept artists, but most are not. Concept artists are specialists who are skilled in illustration or fine art.
They are also commercial artists, in that they have a client (the designer) for whom they work. They create illustrations of the game characters, objects and environments described by the game designer, and if approved, these illustrations are used by the other artists on the art team for to create models, textures, animations, and levels.
Game designers and game artists both apply creativity in their craft, but their skills and responsibilities are very different from each other.
David Mullich 