Electronic Arts

History

Trip Hawkins left Apple to incorporate his own company on May 27, 1982, in San Mateo, California, with about $200,000 of his own money. It was briefly called Amazin' Software; the staff hated the name, and by November it was Electronic Arts. Hawkins's idea was that games were a creative medium and their makers were artists. EA sold its early titles in square sleeves modeled on record albums and printed the designers' photographs on them, a gesture of respect that stood out in an industry of anonymous programmers.

That publisher-of-artists model brought EA into fantasy almost at once. Independent developers without distribution of their own could reach stores through EA, and in 1985 Brian Fargo's Interplay Productions did exactly that with Michael Cranford's The Bard's Tale, a dungeon crawler in the line of Wizardry. EA published it and its sequels of 1986 and 1988; by 2003 the series had sold more than a million copies. The partnership ended badly. When Interplay went its own way, its planned fourth Bard's Tale had to become an unrelated game, Dragon Wars (1989), because the rights stayed behind.

From the 1990s EA grew less by publishing fantasy than by buying the studios that made it. In September 1992 it acquired Richard Garriott's Origin Systems for $35 million in stock, the same year Origin shipped Ultima VII and published Ultima Underworld. In August 1998 it paid Virgin $122.5 million for Westwood Studios, makers of Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore. In June 2006 it bought Mythic Entertainment, and in October 2007 it acquired VG Holding, the parent of BioWare and Pandemic, for a reported $775 million.

Notable work

EA's greatest contribution to online worlds came through Origin: Ultima Online, launched on September 24, 1997, proved that thousands of strangers would pay monthly to live in a shared fantasy world, and it gave the MMORPGs its first great laboratory of player economies, player killing and emergent drama, as in the Assassination of Lord British. The Mythic purchase added Dark Age of Camelot and produced Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (2008), a licensed Games Workshop world that closed in December 2013 when the license ended.

BioWare gave EA its most celebrated role-playing work. Dragon Age: Origins (2009), designed as a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, launched a dark-fantasy franchise EA owned outright, and BioWare Austin's Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011) became EA's big MMO bet. In June 2009 EA merged BioWare and Mythic into a single RPG and MMO group under BioWare's leadership.

Legacy

EA's record in fantasy is one of preservation and loss. It kept worlds running long after their studios were gone: Origin was disbanded in February 2004, Westwood closed in March 2003, and Mythic was shut in May 2014, but Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot passed to Broadsword, a studio founded by Mythic co-founder Rob Denton, and The Old Republic followed in 2023. EA also reissued its past, bundling the Ultima games and in 2011 releasing Ultima IV as freeware.

The company's size has cut both ways. Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024) reached, by EA's account, 1.5 million players in its first quarter, about half of what the company expected, and in January 2025 EA shrank BioWare to fewer than 100 people focused on Mass Effect. Later that year, on September 29, 2025, EA agreed to be taken private by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners in a $55 billion deal. Shareholders approved it in December 2025, the European Commission cleared it in July 2026, and it closed on August 4, 2026, at $210 a share, ending EA's life as a Nasdaq company. The publisher that once called its developers artists still holds the Ultima rights, BioWare's franchises and the legacy of a string of closed studios: one of the deepest catalogs in the history of the Western Computer RPGs (CRPG).