Electronic Arts
More info
- Creator
- Trip Hawkins
- Released
- 1982
- Type
- Video game publisher
The publisher that began by treating developers like rock stars and ended up as the industry's favourite villain.
Trip Hawkins left Apple and founded the company in 1982. Early EA packaged games like record albums, put the developers' names and photos on the box and called them software artists. On the Amiga it left unusually durable marks: the IFF file format, drawn up with Commodore in 1985, and the paint program Deluxe Paint. Rob Hubbard spent some years as its audio director.
Since then the business has mostly been annual sports titles: John Madden Football in 1988, and FIFA from 1993 until the licence lapsed and the series became EA Sports FC in 2023. The Sims came with the purchase of Maxis. The loot boxes in Star Wars Battlefront II in 2017 earned EA the most downvoted comment in Reddit history. In 2025 the company agreed to be taken private by a consortium including Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.