All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (17 page)

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.

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: