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Electronic Arts was started by Trip Hawkins when he left his job at Apple Computer as Director of Product Marketing. Hawkins founded the company on May 28 1982 with a personal investment of over US$200,000. His original name for his newly found company was "Amazin' Software". Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital had met with Trip in February, 1982, encouraging him to leave Apple and use Sequoia's spare office space to get started. In December 1982, Hawkins closed a $2,000,000 round of venture capital that was led by Sequoia and also included Kleiner Perkins and Sevin Rosen .
Hawkins had been refining his ideas for Electronic Arts for more than 7 years. He wrote most of the original business plan on his Apple II at Sequoia's office in August 1982, with the help of the first employee he hired, Rich Melmon, who had done marketing work with Hawkins at Apple. In August, Hawkins also brought on board two of his former staff from Apple, Dave Evans and Pat Marriott, inventing the new job position of " producer" in the game industry. The business plan was edited and refined in September and published on October 8 1982.
Additional staff was hired in between September and November:
Having outgrown the Sequoia space, the company moved to larger office space that overlooked the San Francisco AirportSan Francisco International Airport is located in San Mateo County adjacent to the cities of Millbrae and San Bruno, 13 miles (21 km) south of San Francisco, California. The airport has flights to destinations throughout the Americas and is a major gatewa landing path.
Key early hires in 1983Events January January 1 Beat Raaflaub became Basel Boys Choir's new conductor January 1 the ARPANET officially changes to use the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet. January 1 compulsory wearing of seat belts becomes law in the UK. January 2 The mu included Stewart Bonn , a producer and later a key studio executive, and David Gardner , then a teenager, who is still working as an executive for EA.
Another employee, Nancy Fong , joined in March of 1983 to head up the art department.
The other early founders of the company universally disliked the Amazin' Software name. In October 1983 they held an off-site meeting to come up with a better name for the company.
The business plan had suggested the name, "SoftArt," meant to imply that the company's software was a new kind of art. However, Hawkins and Melmon knew the founders of Software Arts , the creators of VisiCalc, and thought their permission should be obtained. But they did not want the name used because it sounded too similar to their own. However, the name concept was liked by all the attendees.
Then Gordon proposed "Electronic Artists," in tribute to the film company United Artists. However, Steve Hayes opposed, saying, "We're not the artists, they are..." meaning that the developers whose games EA would publish were the artists. Finally Tim Mott proposed Electronic Arts, and the name was liked and approved by all.
According to the 1982 business plan, EA's original business goals were to grow to a billion dollar company in about 6 years. Another goal was to "make software that makes a personal computer worth owning." At the time, Electronic Arts was the 136th game publisher in the US, but the first to reach the billion-dollar goal (although it actually took 12 years).
A novel approach to giving credit to its developers was one of EA's trademarks in its early days. EA was the first video game publisher to treat its developers like rock star s in an industry where developers were more prone to be treated like nameless factory workers. This chracterization was even further reinforced with EA's packaging of most of their games in the "album cover" format of the late 1980s- '90s. This format was pioneered by EA because Hawkins thought that a record album style would both save costs and convey an artistic feeling. EA routinely referred to their developers as "artists" and gave them photo credits in their games and numerous full-page magazine ads. EA also shared lavish profits with their developers, which added to their industry appeal. Because of this novel treatment, EA was able to easily attract the best developers.
In May of 1983 EA shipped:
Today, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Worms and M.U.L.E. are still considered cornerstone products in the history of video games.
After a very successful run on home computers, Electronic Arts later branched out and produced console games as well. Eventually Trip Hawkins moved on to found the now defunct 3DO company. In 2003 he founded a new mobile phone software company, Digital Chocolate, that also began life in the Sequoia offices and had Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins as its lead investors.
EA is now headquartered in Redwood City, California. Its current CEO is Larry Probst .
Probst considers himself a man of principle and has refused to follow the innovative example set by Take Two Interactive, whose ultraviolent Grand Theft Auto franchise became the dominant brand in many key demographic sectors from 2000 through 2003. As a result, Probst has been heavily criticized by Wall Street analysts, and the price of EA stock has suffered somewhat.