Electronic Art's History
Electronic Arts Inc. was started in 1982 by Trip Hawkins and his group of visionary friends. When they started they had eleven people and five million dollars they got from private investors. They considered video games a new art form and the creators of those games artists. they believed that interactive media was more interesting and important than passive forms of traditional media like movies and television. When they started Electronic Arts was considered a pioneer in the industry of early home computer games. They were always thought about as being a flexible company because they would develop their games for whatever software was the most popular at the time. They would get some of their ideas from freelancers who would submit their ideas to Electronic Arts and these ideas would go through an in house committee to either be accepted and made or denied and thrown out. As time when on though EA started to make their games in house and used less and less freelance ideas. Since EA's software developed only games for computer they were the leader in computer games by 1986 but the market was limited due to the console market springing up. To counter this they started to make games for consoles as well as continuing to make computer games. In 1986 Nintendo was the video game giant taking up eighty percent of the market and although working with Nintendo may have made EA a lot of money they turned down Nintendo's offer. They did this because the offer would have limited EA from working with Nintendo's competitors like Sega. This was a big risk because the 16 bit sega Genesis was entirely untested. They made 8 games for the Genesis which cost them about 250,000 per game for a total investment of about two million dollars. In 1990 EA released the games and while Genesis sales didn't pick up until 1991 one fourth of EA's profits in 1990 came from games they made for the Sega Genesis. Along with the Genesis games they made in 1990 they also started to do work with Nintendo as Nintendo no longer stipulated that they were the only company EA work with. Over time EA gained a reputation for making good original games and became a dominant leader in the sports game industry.