Wow, if that's true, then my perception of activision has been wrong for a long time
[edit] it is!
[edit] it is!
[Trip] Hawkins had developed the ideas of
treating software as an art form and calling
the developers, "software artists"
[...]
Their first such ad, accompanied by the slogan
"We see farther," was the first video game
advertisement to feature software designers.
EA also shared lavish profits with their
developers, which added to their industry appeal.
The square "album cover" boxes (such as the covers
for 1983's M.U.L.E. and Pinball Construction Set)
were a popular packaging concept by Electronic
Arts, which wanted to represent their developers
as "rock stars"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Arts#1982%E2%80%931991:_Trip_Hawkins_era,_founding,_and_early_success
Incredible to think of, in light of the microtransaction nightmare hellscape seen in most EA software.
They definitely gave this guy the aura of a rock star in the packaging that came with the title.
Same thing with Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set.
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-400-800-xl-xe-pinball-c...
Treat yourself to clicking on the thumbnails. The "liner notes" are incredible.
The original "Don't be evil."
It's not like EA was a non-profit org. They were there to make money.
Think about the industry they were openly aping, with their "rock star" programmer-artists and their boxes that resembled the wonderful gatefold LP album covers of yore. The popular music industry is not exactly uh, averse to capitalism.
Also, their advertising was, well, hmm.
I think it's no accident that their image perfectly calibrated to appeal the sort of person who could actually afford a home computer in the early 1980s. The kind of guy who fancied himself a bit of an intellectual in one way or another. They weren't the first with this approach; Infocom had a lot of success with a similar corporate image and advertising campaign previously.
I do think there was quite a bit of genuine sincerity at the core of "early EA", but they were definitely chasing $$$ from the start as well.
As a teenager, we definitely got $50 of enjoyment per year out of the 16-bit editions. Even back in the 90s it was actually a pretty affordable form of entertainment if you got a few dozen fun gaming sessions out of it with your buddies. There weren't a lot of other ways to spend $50 and be entertained for months.
Same with Capcom's hilariously incremental updates to Street Fighter II. We honestly did get full value from them. If you're putting dozens of hours into a game those incremental updates are super valueable.
These days, of course, I have nobody to play with.
So these games wouldn't be worth $6 to me today, let alone $60. =(
The first few years of NHL and Madden titles for the Sega Genesis were revolutionary. They were the first games in their genres to somewhat accurately simulate their sports in a fast and fluid way.
Madden in particular was something like a tour-de-force of software engineering: a full 22 independent dudes characters on the field, actually playing their positions, following a realistic and deep playbook, nearly all of American football's arcane rules represented, and a nifty pseudo-3D playfield.
All written in assembly, on a 7mhz CPU. Mindblowing.
The first 3-4 years of annual updates were incredible. They were iterative, in the best possible software engineering sense of the word. Core ideas refined and polished, a few new key ideas added onto a strong base design.
Madden '93 (the third installment) is where it peaked for me; some say Madden '94.
January 1984, Jack Tramiel essentially got booted out of the company he founded (Commodore).
July 1984, Jack Tramiel bought the Consumer Division of Atari Inc. from Warner Communications.
It's not that there's a specific set of people or technological concepts running through all of them, but each one has a strong connection to the next.
But yeah, that's super interesting too. I skipped Lynx in my console journey so wasn't as familiar with that, but I didn't realize the 3DO (which I did have) was loosely part of the talent family too. But yeah, now that I think about it, I guess Hawkins must have ended up tapping the talent pools freeing up from the ST/Amiga/GS generations since those died out right around the time 3DO was being developed.
Growing up, that was the lens I always saw them through (and I had minor addictions to Laser Blast and River Raid, among others), so to see what they've become, well, you know. Not the same in any way from the David Crane days, just as it is with Atari from the Bushnell days through Warner, then Tramiel, then JTS, Hasbro, etc through present day.
Days long, long gone. The memories are nice.