Electronic Arts

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Electronic Arts Inc. (エレクトロニック・アーツ) (EA), also known as EA Studios and the Fun Factory,[3][4] is an American video game developer, publisher, and distributor. One of the most significant third-party publishers for Sega consoles, the Sega Genesis quickly became the company's home platform of choice during its heyday in the 1990s.

Company

Founded and incorporated on May 28, 1982 by Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer games industry and was notable for promoting the designers and programmers responsible for its games. Originally, EA was a home computing game publisher, however in the late 1980s, the company began developing games in-house and began to support consoles by the early 1990s. EA later grew via acquisition of several successful developers, and by the early 2000s, EA had become one of the world's largest third-party publishers.

Genesis

“ We had just reverse engineered the NES and EA had another team reverse engineering the Genesis at another location. They put us in a building, away from other programmers, amongst the nice people in the accounting department. Everything we did was kept secret and we worked in a kind of “clean room” environment, so we wouldn’t be tainted by materials that had been copyrighted. We carefully followed the same techniques Compaq used to reverse engineer the IBM. After our NES reverse engineering work was complete, they asked us to port Populous and try to figure out the rest of the Genesis. The information we received from the Genesis reverse engineering team had many holes in it, which we attempted to fill by poking at the machine through code in various ways. One of the holes we found about after production, one single bit was left unset in Populous and it made the screen colors bleed. Populous was ported in an amazingly short amount of time, and was ready for CES when Trip dropped a bomb on SEGA and showed them a completed game on their machine that wasn’t beholden to their monopolistic publishing practices. From what I understand, this helped Trip Hawkins (EA’s founder) negotiate a heck of a deal for EA to be able to manufacture Genesis cartridges with SEGA’s blessings. „

— Kevin McGrath[5]


Initially EA had planned to avoid direct contact with Sega[6], reverse-engineering the Mega Drive which later formed a barganing chip for securing a better deal for EA as a third-party developer than rival firms. EA would go on to make huge gains on consoles, particularly when it came to sports games (starting with John Madden Football in 1990), and supported the Mega Drive until 1997 - well after others had abandoned the system.

EA's second large patent project was a "[proprietary] technique to move data quickly from a Genesis cartridge into either CPU RAM or Video RAM. The data could be anything, and it was mostly used as a fast and cheap sprite scaler. But alas, by then the Genesis was fading and there were many technical issues to over come between the slightly variant Genesis machines. I’m not sure if this chip ever made it into any released games, but it could have transformed this little machine into something more competitive." According to technical director Kevin McGrath, he is unaware of this special chip used in any released Electronic Arts games.[5]

Post-Sega

EA supported the Sega Saturn, but its refusal to support the Dreamcast in favor of preparing titles for the PlayStation 2 is seen by some as a contributing factor to the console's failure. At the 2011 Tokyo Game Show, Sega announced it would be partnering with EA to market FIFA 12 World Class Soccer, Battlefield 3, Shadow of the Damned, The Sims 3 Pets, Need for Speed: The Run, Mass Effect 3, and SSX in Japan (with EA's Japanese division retaining publishing rights), making this the first time EA worked with Sega since the Saturn (with the exception of one 2000 game).

EA Sports

Success in the sports genre led to EA establishing a sub-brand, "Electronic Arts Sports Network" in 1991, which would adorn most of its sports games until 1993. However, similarities in the name caught the eye of US sports television channel ESPN, who sued EA for trademark infringement. The two parties settled out of court, with EA renaming its brand "EA Sports" and ESPN giving advertising space for EA Sports games. Curiously EA and ESPN would sign a 15-year deal in 2005 allowing for ESPN graphics to appear in EA Sports games (with ESPN having previously worked with Sega in its 2K series of sports titles).

Packaging

EA cartridge VS default European cartridge.png

Electronic Arts are unusual in that they produced their own Mega Drive cartridges, boxes and manuals from factories in Taiwan and Puerto Rico (on a much greater scale than the likes of Accolade and Codemasters who also took manufacturing into their own hands). EA originally packaged its North American games in cardboard boxes, moving to the "standard" clamshell design in 1991. In Europe it began with much larger and "stickier" clamshell designs before conforming with its rivals around the same period. EA cartridges, however, never changed, being taller, less larger (fitting on any region of the system) and iconically having square with a yellow "tab" on the left hand side (colours varied in Japan) which serves no practical purpose.

EA's Saturn PAL games also differ from their competitors, opting for larger clamshell packaging while others were forced to deal with Sega's cardboard/plastic hybrid solution.

Magazine articles

Main article: Electronic Arts/Magazine articles.

Softography

Master System

Mega Drive

Game Gear

Mega-CD

32X

IBM PC

Saturn

Hikaru

Dreamcast

GameCube

Logos

  • Original logo

  • Logo used from 2000 to 2020

  • Electronic Arts Sports Network logo

  • EA Sports logo (1993)

References

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NEC Retro has more information related to Electronic Arts
  1. ↑ Electronic Gaming Retail News, "January 1992" (US; 199x-xx-xx), page 26
  2. ↑ E3 2001 Directory, page 83
  3. ↑ File:The Immortal MD US Manual.pdf, page 2
  4. ↑ April 2025 correspondence between Futurescape Productions founder Kevin McGrath and Sega Retro editor Alexander Rojas
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Interview: Kevin McGrath (2005-02-01) by Sega-16
  6. ↑ VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, "August 1990" (US; 1990-0x-xx), page 82
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