The future would provide increasing power. “Entertainment could be educational and vice versa. “The summary first page of our business plan quoted Marshall McLuhan, who said anyone who tries to distinguish between entertainment and education doesn’t know the first thing about either,” says Gordon. “The software artists that EA launched with all gave it so much creative street cred.”ĮA’s campaign sought to summarize Hawkins’ vision of the artist - rather than the computer - as the primary conduit between technology and pleasure. “We humanized the culture and the rhetoric of the company,” he says. We thought people were going to care about the people who created their games as much as people care about the people who make their music. “We were talking about software that was worthy of the minds that used it. “When EA started, the idea was to make games for 28-year-olds when everybody else was making games for 13-year-olds,” says Gordon, who was central in creating the ad campaign. Such an idea was entirely new back in 1983. Game makers may not be stars, but they can be micro-celebrities with their own followings and adherents. The idea of game creators having some sort of marketing pull has flittered in and out of gaming’s consciousness ever since, but never has it been as powerful as it is now. Today, those ads look both arcane and prescient. “We thought people were going to care about the people who created their games as much as people care about the people who make their music,” says Bonn. The ads featured moody photographs of its game developers.
#Free game making software cry full#
The company took out full spreads in top magazines, like Scientific American, proclaiming “We See Farther” and that computer games could make a person cry. These days, people remember early Electronic Arts not so much for Archon and Hard Hat Mack as for its outlandish contributions to the fledgling craft of computer game marketing.
But even from the beginning, it was not so much the product that defined this new company as the hype that it inspired. The first round of EA’s games sold at different levels of success, just enough for the company to stay in business.