Hawkins didn’t waste any time. He wanted to make a deal right away. Tobey’s parents came with him to EA’s offices to oversee a lucrative royalty deal for Skyfox, a game that would eventually sell more than a million copies. While there, Hawkins took the teen under his wing, driving him around the Bay Area to see the sights. Tobey returned the favor by working extreme hours to put the finishing touches on Skyfox, sometimes for 110 hours a week. When the game became a hit, he bought with his first royalty check a fancy black JPS Lotus Esprit. He would speed through California’s redwood forests like he was a young prince of the Silicon Valley, once with an Italian TV documentary crew frantically trying to keep up. Tobey wasn’t exactly thrifty, and he liked the fame he tasted, likening himself to a rock star. If it weren’t for his parents, he would have burned through all the royalty money he received.
Still a teenager, Tobey became part of a small, tightly knit group of twenty-five employees who met each Friday in a nondescript conference room to go over the week’s events, everything from videogame schedules to marketing to office gossip. Always at the head of the table was Trip Hawkins, who constantly needed more money to expand the company’s reach. Early on in his search for capital, the boss introduced his latest group of bankers, imploring his employees, “Be nice to them. They’ll give us money.” With the precision of a military maneuver, the jeans-and-T-shirts-clad staff lofted well-aimed Nerf balls at the suits, pummeling the financiers, who left the meeting in a tizzy. Hawkins was miffed, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. All evening long, he wined and dined and schmoozed them, telling them about his grand plans, telling them he wanted to make a game that would make people cry, just like the movies did. At the end, the moneymen gave Hawkins millions.
The graphics and play in the inaugural Madden effort that was finally released for the Apple II in June 1989 were like caveman drawings when measured by today’s standards. The art looked like a cheap cartoon. Only sixteen of the NFL’s twenty-eight teams were represented. While the real players were there, the teams’ logos weren’t. And while the stats for each player were carefully honed for realism’s sake, every player looked the same. On the cover of the first game, the smiling Madden, holding a football running back–style, looks as much surprised as he is happy. It’s as if he’s about to say, “Gee, I know football, but what’s this videogame thing all about?” Nonetheless, the gaming world went wild over the game. Nibble, an Apple II enthusiast magazine of the time, detailed the many functions of the game and highlighted the news that you could make your own plays “if you’re really serious about football.” Sports fans drooled. While television only permitted football fans to sit back and watch, Hawkins’s computer game allowed fans to feel they were strategizing on the sidelines and on the field. They could call their own plays as coach, throw the ball as quarterback, and catch the ball as a receiver. They were inside football like they never had been allowed to be before.
A big part of Hawkins’s videogame dream was making John Madden Football an even bigger success than Tobey’s Skyfox. He considered this a given. But business deals kept him equally busy … and nerve-wracked. Electronic Arts was becoming a global player, but, according to its top executives, it still wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Hawkins had been focusing on computer games, but he was very frustrated with what he saw as the shortcomings of the home computer platforms. He also encountered an extreme lack of interest on the part of the manufacturers of those platforms to grow the market from the standpoint of entertainment. Hawkins and his elite band of MBAs would make pilgrimages to companies like IBM to beg for the additions of joysticks or a sound chip that made more than an annoying beep. They wouldn’t give up, the next time lobbying for sixteen colors to make the gaming experience even better than the supremely successful Nintendo Entertainment System. These pleas fell on deaf ears.
But consoles seemed little better to Hawkins, who didn’t like the eight-by-ten-inch Nintendo console because the graphics weren’t powerful enough and the machine had no storage capacity. To top it off, the Japanese company’s licensing program was restrictive and expensive. Yet Nintendo was a behemoth, with an unbelievably tight lock on the vast majority of the home videogame market in North America. Hawkins’s Glückschmerz grew by the day.
Then, two days before Halloween in the fall of 1988, Sega released the Mega Drive in Japan. Hawkins himself made the trek to Tokyo, stood in line to buy the machine, and brought it back to the United States, knowing that the console would be released within a year in North America as the Sega Genesis. Once Hawkins got it out of the box, he nearly jumped for joy. For inside was a sixteen-bit MC68000 Motorola processor, the same chip that was in the Amiga and the Mac, not to mention the Atari ST and all the arcade machines. EA employees, thought Hawkins, could make games based on that processor with their hands tied behind their backs. To his staff, Hawkins predicted that the Genesis would be a hit for $189 and that it would be available in the US market two years before the next generation Nintendo machines. The boastful CEO may have missed the boat on the first Nintendo boom, but he vowed that he wasn’t going to be left behind with the Sega surge. Yet there were those in the company who believed that Nintendo would release its new, state-of-the-art system early—just to blow Sega out of the water.
So began a war with Sega over the Sega Genesis console during 1987 and 1988, a battle that Bing Gordon said included a “bet the company” decision. Hawkins had his technicians take the machine apart to see how it was made, just as he began thinking about how he could make money with Sega. Two separate teams worked feverishly on the project while Hawkins figured out a master plan. Hawkins knew that Sega’s licensing policy was just as Draconian as Nintendo’s. Then an idea coursed through his synapses. He decided to make games for the system without being part of the Japanese company’s licensing program. Hawkins’s aha moment, however, was his alone. Others disdained it. The arguments and anger Hawkins encountered came from everywhere. Middle management felt the concept was scurrilous. More important, the board of directors smelled an expensive lawsuit for copyright infringement, one that could put the company out of business. Don Valentine, the venture capitalist, told Hawkins tersely and in no uncertain terms that his scheme would risk the capital of all of his investors. Yet Hawkins stood his ground. It was a hard row to hoe, but there was one bright spot. Hawkins was thrilled when his engineers reverse engineered the Sega Mega System in a matter of weeks.
The directive went out throughout the company: Games, including Madden, would be built for the upcoming Genesis—with or without Sega’s permission. The monumental risk took its toll on Hawkins: He couldn’t sleep at night, worrying, plotting, then worrying some more. He told those closest to him, “Sega just wants to huff and puff and blow our house down. But you worry about a lot of things in a situation like that. You worry about having injunctions that prevent you from shipping your product, about losing and being liable for significant damages. You worry about them changing the platform so your games don’t work anymore and you don’t know why. There’s just a lot of things you worry about.”
The worry didn’t slow him down. It energized his resolve. During the vitriolic war with Sega that followed, Hawkins played a combination of hardball and chicken. More quickly than expected, Sega caved and signed an astoundingly favorable agreement with Electronic Arts. That agreement brought the average cost paid to Sega per game down to about 35 cents. By contrast, other companies that joined the Sega licensing program had to pay the Japanese company an astronomical fee of about $8 to $10 per game.
In the coming years, Hawkins had everyone from racing ace Richard Petty to baseball coaching legend Earl Weaver appear in sports games. Yet Madden was the franchise that made history, earning more than $3 billion since it was first released. Much of that success was due to a new marketing plan for games, a kind of preplanned obsolescence and keep-up-with-the-Joneses business ethic that would have given social economist Thorstein Veblen pause: If you didn’t have the new Madden,
packed with this year’s players, this year’s stats, and this year’s plays, you weren’t up to date. You weren’t as cool as your game-playing neighbor who procured the newest version. Fans bought the hype of videogame-style conspicuous consumption then, and they buy it to this day.
Still, Hawkins never achieved one of his goals: He never released a game that had the emotion and drama to make people cry.
Ray Tobey and other early employees said that when Electronic Arts went public and its stock began trading in September 1989, things changed at the company. People weren’t as friendly, and some seemed to be out for themselves. The team spirit wasn’t gone by any means. Yet working there wasn’t quite as much fun anymore. The bonds were of employees working together, and of acquaintance, not of friends having fun while making games that were like their babies. Hawkins’s ego became bigger, and he was harder to deal with as the profits continued to roll in.
Then came the fall. In one of the most documented failures in videogame history, Hawkins decided to move Electronic Arts into the console making business. While he remained chairman of EA, he left the company in 1991 to concentrate on a powerful new machine. With two hundred employees in San Mateo, an EA spinoff called the 3DO Company made a CD-based multimedia game machine in 1993. Its partners, Time Warner, Sanyo, Matsushita, and AT&T, were impressive, as were the 3DO’s computing power and graphics. Its licensing plan was more palatable and even-handed than Nintendo’s. The company would charge game companies $3 per game sold. Calling him a guru, the New York Times estimated Hawkins’s fortune at $200 million, and indicated he might be the next Bill Gates, a visionary who “rejects the traditional symbols and perks of corporate power.” Hawkins had a car with sixty thousand miles on it and a small-ish house. His only indulgence at the time was a $20,000 home entertainment system. The Times indicated that he was hell-bent on having Madden-like success with 3DO.
Unfortunately for Hawkins, the machine was long-delayed and far too expensive at $699. Within a couple of years, the company was out of the console business. By 2003, 3DO had ceased to exist. Hawkins boxed up its intellectual properties and sold them in the office, garage sale–style, for pennies on the dollar. His career in big games at big companies was over.
In February 2005, a group of journalists and many Electronic Arts employees crowded into a small restaurant in New York’s Little Italy to rub elbows with Hollywood stars Robert Duvall and James Caan. As wine flowed and giant shrimp were consumed by the dozen, journalists wondered why EA was spending a rumored $20 million to make a version of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic The Godfather and an equally jaw-dropping $300,000 to celebrate more than a year before the game even hit store shelves. Just before James Caan made a very brief speech, Electronic Arts vice president Jeff Brown sauntered over to a few of the assembled journalists. “I just don’t know why people keep saying Trip Hawkins founded the company. He didn’t.” Having planted a seed of doubt, Brown faded into the crowd. Journalist Steven Kent wondered aloud why Brown was making an effort to change history. Then, twice in 2006, an anonymous user tried to excise Hawkins from Electronic Arts’ Wikipedia page. Through the use of computer software, the changes were traced—to the offices of Electronic Arts. Today, Hawkins doesn’t talk to anyone who works at Electronic Arts, nor do they speak to him.
Now, when Ray Tobey and a crew of the early staffers meet to eat Afghan cuisine for a weekly lunch at Kabul in San Carlos, they talk about the good old days, about how they changed the nature of videogames with their hard work ethic and pioneering spirit. But they don’t talk about Hawkins much. At the company headquarters in Redwood City, Trip Hawkins’s legacy is almost forgotten by those younger game makers who toil among the thousands of designers, marketers, and producers. When queried, the people who recently joined the large company (which at the peak had 8,500 employees) barely remember Hawkins’s name. They know very little of the swagger, the toil, or the ingenuity. One man even called him Trip Hopkins. A current Electronic Arts worker bee said, “He’s just a picture who hangs on the wall. The older people here said he was totally difficult to work for. Isn’t he reduced to making cell phone games now?”
Football superstars have forgotten as well. On the twentieth anniversary of Madden Football’s first release, five football players, all with Super Bowl rings, gathered at a trendy Manhattan club to appear before the press and discuss the game. All the players had been Madden cover stars, die-hard players who’d slip the game in a console after practice and occasionally gamble on Madden when they played together or on the road. Marshall Faulk, the Super Bowl champion running back, admitted, “Yeah, some of us have lost some cars or some mortgage payments playing the game.” Ray Lewis, the fast-talking middle linebacker from the Baltimore Ravens, added, “The game’s not like real life playing at all, especially the angles the players hit other players.” But, he said, it’s as close as anyone’s ever going to get. When the name of the founder of Electronic Arts was brought up, none of the players recognized it. “Don’t know him at all. Does he play?” asked quarterback Daunte Culpepper.
Trip Hawkins, who now innovates on a smaller level with mobile and Facebook applications through a company called Digital Chocolate, continues to think highly of himself—with good reason. For without Hawkins’s work in the 1980s, the oblivious workers from the sprawling Redwood City campus might not have jobs at all, certainly not at Electronic Arts. The big-time superstar football players wouldn’t have the honor of being on the cover of a game, the appearance on which begets nearly the same respect and admiration as winning the Super Bowl. And for us gamers, it’s unfathomable to imagine a world without Electronic Arts, without landmark games like The Sims, The Need for Speed, Dead Space, and, especially, intensely immersive sports games for FIFA, NASCAR, the NHL, and the NBA. EA is especially important for broadening games’ appeal to include a new class of gamer: beer-guzzling armchair quarterbacks and towel-snapping jocks. With EA, videogames weren’t just for the arcade crowds anymore; nor were they confined to those who liked those wonderfully cute (but difficult) Nintendo games. Games were now targeted at the booze-bellied Strat-O-Matic addict. These rabid fans goaded their friends, “C’mon. You gotta get this thing; just play it and see. Just throw the long ball and when Jerry Rice catches it, you’ll understand.” Games did not yet appeal to everyman. But they were inching closer by capturing legions of sports mavens and average fans. Because of Madden, Hawkins, and Electronic Arts, the industry had moved one step closer to taking over the living room.
GRUES, MYST, AND THE 7TH GUEST
But what if you wanted to play games that had more heft, had more than action and more than puzzles? What if you wanted a story that could be as thorough and thrilling as a popular novel? Trip Hawkins’s games couldn’t make people cry. Could anyone else’s?
While coin-operated games and console games were having their heyday, the adventure game was quietly becoming a mainstay on another platform—the PC. It was a slow, stealthy rise, flanked by science fiction cultists, sword and sorcery devotees, and code-appreciating tech nerds. Here was a thinking person’s game genre, one for the Dungeons & Dragons role playing crowd, one that was more literate and arguably more profound than any arcade or Nintendo offering.
The niche began in earnest in early 1980 with an interactive text adventure series called Zork, which every adventure game maker onward cited as influential. Because it had no graphics, the game required you to imagine, almost in the same way you would read a novel and fill in the details in your mind’s eye. As the game began, you entered a house, found a dungeon, and dealt with devious grues, batlike monsters. Described in Zork’s fiction, the grue was:
[a] sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers (you, the player), but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.
If you read that description in the middle of the night i
n the glow of your old computer screen, it chilled you right to the marrow.
Zork eventually was picked up by a million fans and inspired six traditional paperback novels, and its success marked an auspicious beginning for the new niche. But it was Myst and The 7th Guest, games of the nineties made around the same time, that were responsible not only for a tidal wave in videogame sales, but for a meteoric rise in the sales of personal computers with CD-ROM drives. Myst was cryptic, unique, and full of a graphical splendor that was part Salvador Dalí and part Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island—with a bit of the myths of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien thrown in for good measure. There was nothing to shoot. There were few words spoken by the characters. There was no linear story. The gamer wasn’t asked to be the hero. Initially, players had no idea what the hell was going on, what the hell to do, or how the hell to progress in Myst.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 12