All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (16 page)

Early on, Hawkins made decisions like an early movie mogul: He bet with his gut as much as his brain, choosing people he called artists based on not just their reputation as programmers, but whether or not he believed their ideas were a cut above the rest. His careful choice of words, the fact that he was calling kids who were fresh out
of college “artists,” had the salubrious effect of intriguing investors from the realms of movies and music. At the time, everything done at the company overflowed with originality. But no one really liked the name Amazin’ Software. To name the baby, Hawkins took the group of eleven employees to the beach at Pajaro Dunes, California, for the weekend. The varied species of birds chirped, the Monterey Bay waves washed against the fan-shaped beach, and all day the game makers argued about the name. With a bonfire ablaze and booze flowing, the motley crew settled on Electronic Arts during an all-night brainstorming session. The name was a riff on United Artists, the movie company formed by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith to give the artists more creative control in a Hollywood dominated by the often oppressive star system. But not everyone in the group of eleven had their say. A couple of them became too tired or too drunk and had gone to sleep by the time the name was finalized at two a.m. They had to live with the name even if they didn’t like it.

If you saw Hawkins’s crew at a convention, they looked like they were richer and smarter than anyone else. They all had MBAs, while all the other nerds were dressed in T-shirts and jeans. Sure, they were full of themselves, thinking they could perform miracles with software. But they could back it up too. The company’s early offerings included an educational collaboration with Timothy Leary, a pun-filled role playing game called A Bard’s Tale, and the exceptional Pinball Construction Set designed by Bill Budge, in which you could make your own pinball tables. But none of the games were runaway megahits. Then Hawkins remembered an old television ad for the unctuous hair product Vitalis. The hair care company aired a series of TV commercials that featured a one-on-one basketball matchup. It was kind of a basketball rendition of Home Run Derby, where the shooting of hoops was shown as short, one-minute vignettes. Hawkins told Gordon and the gang, “I want us to make
a one-on-one basketball game. My hero in sports is Dr. J [Julius Erving], and he has a natural foil, Larry Byrd.” Gordon, who was a sports fan himself, loved the concept.

Despite Hawkins’s bluster, it was difficult to see the art within those early floppy disks. Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One on One was little more than two stick figures battling it out on an unadorned basketball court. But what you could see in the title was Hawkins’s penchant for using superstars in his games to help sell them. Hawkins not only wanted to rub elbows with the greats, he wanted to be a superstar himself. But he could not be a superstar, a true superstar, until Electronic Arts made “The Football Game.” Hawkins’s real passion was football. He pored over plays and what made them work like a fanatical amateur coach. After Hawkins attended the NFC Championship football game in 1982, in which Joe Montana hurled a football to receiver Dwight Clark, a fantastic completion simply known as “The Catch,” he approached the former Notre Dame star and asked him to work on his computer football game. Hawkins was discouraged to learn that the quarterback already had a long-term deal with Atari. Undaunted, he sought out a more minor subject, the tequila-loving Joe Kapp, who was a former football chucker for the Minnesota Vikings.

In a conversation on the UC Berkeley football field, where Kapp was football coach, Hawkins proposed, “I’ll pay you a consulting fee if you give me some pointers on how to make an authentic game.”

Kapp, who had a mammoth ego, perhaps because he was an actor in successful films like
The Longest Yard
and
Semi-Tough
, looked down the field as if he had seen his quarterback throw an interception in the end zone. He shot back, “I want my name on that game and I want royalties, too. And I want my picture on the cover.” On the drive home, Hawkins thought, “If it’s going to go that way, I’m going to go to the front of the parade and get the biggest I can get, John Madden.” That wouldn’t be easy. Hawkins needed
Madden—badly—but Madden didn’t need Hawkins. Madden already had his share of fame as the Super Bowl–winning coach of the Oakland Raiders who had parlayed his success and personality into a likeable, folksy style of TV football announcing. He also had authored a few bestselling books and was the affable pitchman for Miller Lite beer’s “Tastes Great, Less Filling” television campaign. (The
New York Times
judged that Madden made a “small fortune” for just the commercials.) Madden’s celebrity was growing as fast as his waistline. Because of his rising star, the former coach wanted a greater cash advance than Hawkins had given Julius Erving for the basketball game. Madden received a whopping $100,000, a huge amount for the time. But Erving had had the foresight to accept Electronic Arts stock at a very cheap price as partial payment. Madden declined the offer. To this day, Madden still jokes that accepting stock in the new videogame company could have made him a richer man in the late 1980s and beyond. But Madden, a pragmatist to a fault, wanted his money up front because he didn’t believe the newfangled technology would sell. In fact, he knew very little about computers and even less about computer games. The real reason he agreed to lend his name to the game was because he was teaching an extension class for football fans at the University of California and thought the game would be useful for his lectures and nothing else. (In the last twenty years, EA shares increased by 2,500 percent at their peak. Nonetheless, Madden is likely to have been paid between $75 and $100 million for lending his voice and name to the game during the last two decades.)

Even at the beginning of preproduction, it was not easy going, for Madden was a bit of a diva who didn’t live up to his everyman image. In fact, he could be mean and demeaning. Every other word Hawkins heard from Madden was the “F” word. It was amazing to the young CEO that Madden could put up a front on television without ever dropping the F bomb. Yet the winning coach’s input
was invaluable. Hawkins traveled to meet Madden after a Broncos game in Denver and planned to take a two-day train ride with the airplane-phobic personality to Oakland. On the train, Hawkins asked Madden to create the playbook for the game, but Madden balked at a job of such immense proportion. Then, because of the data processing limitations of computers at the time, Hawkins, along with a game producer and game developer, suggested that the game be skeleton, a form of football that includes just seven players on each team. The blockers would be taken out, but all of the same plays would remain.

“Fuck that and fuck you people,” blurted Madden. “Either we do it fuckin’ right or we don’t fuckin’ do it at all.”

Hawkins wanted to do it “fuckin’ right” as well, but the road to release was filled with obstacles. Work on Madden took so long, and was so overbudget, that everyone at the burgeoning company became increasingly frustrated, even disheartened. Early investors began to worry that the Madden game could bankrupt the new company with the promising future. Most of EA’s other games were on schedule, making it to stores on time. But the football game was so often postponed that whispering employees began calling it Trip’s Folly. One day, as the planes growled from above the EA offices, Hawkins’s first hire, Rich Melmon, called a Madden meeting in a cramped conference room. Rich Hilleman, the game’s producer, and marketing whiz Bing Gordon began arguing about the seemingly endless production process. Soon, the volume of their words grew as loud as the din of the jets above. In a flash, the large men, who both played amateur hockey, were out of their chairs and in each other’s face. Melmon leaped out of the way as Gordon threw Hilleman into the wall hard, the way a hockey player would check the opposition into the boards. Hawkins told people that “the force left this big indentation in the wall that was about three feet high and about a foot and a half wide. It just caved the whole wall in. And Bing wrote a
note on it, commemorating the occasion. None of us is afraid to bang heads and fight for what we believe in. Literally.”

After three years of game production and no end in sight, outside auditors trudged over to the Electronic Arts office and instructed Hawkins to expense and write off all the cash advances that the company had paid to John Madden. The auditors deemed them to be completely unrecoupable. They also wanted Hawkins to halt production on the game, then and there. Inside the new company, more staffers began laughing and joking about Trip’s Folly. This time, they weren’t just whispering. But to the young designers, there was one positive thing about Hawkins’s football game obsession. As Ray Tobey put it, “At least it will keep him away from interfering with our other projects.” Tobey was a boy genius, a brilliant but occasionally arrogant artistic phenomenon who was working on computer games while still in high school, toiling at babysitting jobs to pay for his $800 Commodore Pet 2001. Tobey spent most of his time at the computer trying to make a game that was as close to real life as a computer in the 1980s could make it. Through word of mouth, Tobey’s flying and shooting game based on F-15 fighter jets came to the attention of Apple’s Steve Wozniak when Tobey was just sixteen. Wozniak was wowed at the sound, graphics, and game play. He kept saying, “This can’t be done on the Apple II. I can’t believe it. This can’t be done.” He gave Tobey a calling card and added a note to Trip Hawkins, which read, “Please consider this flight simulator as the
finest
Apple game ever done.”

Hawkins didn’t waste any time. He wanted to make a deal right away. Tobey’s parents came with him to EA’s offices to oversee a lucrative royalty deal for Skyfox, a game that would eventually sell more than a million copies. While there, Hawkins took the teen under his wing, driving him around the Bay Area to see the sights. Tobey returned the favor by working extreme hours to put
the finishing touches on Skyfox, sometimes for 110 hours a week. When the game became a hit, he bought with his first royalty check a fancy black JPS Lotus Esprit. He would speed through California’s redwood forests like he was a young prince of the Silicon Valley, once with an Italian TV documentary crew frantically trying to keep up. Tobey wasn’t exactly thrifty, and he liked the fame he tasted, likening himself to a rock star. If it weren’t for his parents, he would have burned through all the royalty money he received.

Still a teenager, Tobey became part of a small, tightly knit group of twenty-five employees who met each Friday in a nondescript conference room to go over the week’s events, everything from videogame schedules to marketing to office gossip. Always at the head of the table was Trip Hawkins, who constantly needed more money to expand the company’s reach. Early on in his search for capital, the boss introduced his latest group of bankers, imploring his employees, “Be nice to them. They’ll give us money.” With the precision of a military maneuver, the jeans-and-T-shirts-clad staff lofted well-aimed Nerf balls at the suits, pummeling the financiers, who left the meeting in a tizzy. Hawkins was miffed, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. All evening long, he wined and dined and schmoozed them, telling them about his grand plans, telling them he wanted to make a game that would make people cry, just like the movies did. At the end, the moneymen gave Hawkins millions.

The graphics and play in the inaugural Madden effort that was finally released for the Apple II in June 1989 were like caveman drawings when measured by today’s standards. The art looked like a cheap cartoon. Only sixteen of the NFL’s twenty-eight teams were represented. While the real players were there, the teams’ logos weren’t. And while the stats for each player were carefully honed for realism’s sake, every player looked the same. On the cover of the first game, the smiling Madden, holding a football running back–style, looks as much surprised as he is happy. It’s as if he’s about to say,
“Gee, I know football, but what’s this videogame thing all about?” Nonetheless, the gaming world went wild over the game.
Nibble
, an Apple II enthusiast magazine of the time, detailed the many functions of the game and highlighted the news that you could make your own plays “if you’re really serious about football.” Sports fans drooled. While television only permitted football fans to sit back and watch, Hawkins’s computer game allowed fans to feel they were strategizing on the sidelines and on the field. They could call their own plays as coach, throw the ball as quarterback, and catch the ball as a receiver. They were inside football like they never had been allowed to be before.

A big part of Hawkins’s videogame dream was making John Madden Football an even bigger success than Tobey’s Skyfox. He considered this a given. But business deals kept him equally busy … and nerve-wracked. Electronic Arts was becoming a global player, but, according to its top executives, it still wasn’t firing on all cylinders. Hawkins had been focusing on computer games, but he was very frustrated with what he saw as the shortcomings of the home computer platforms. He also encountered an extreme lack of interest on the part of the manufacturers of those platforms to grow the market from the standpoint of entertainment. Hawkins and his elite band of MBAs would make pilgrimages to companies like IBM to beg for the additions of joysticks or a sound chip that made more than an annoying beep. They wouldn’t give up, the next time lobbying for sixteen colors to make the gaming experience even better than the supremely successful Nintendo Entertainment System. These pleas fell on deaf ears.

But consoles seemed little better to Hawkins, who didn’t like the eight-by-ten-inch Nintendo console because the graphics weren’t powerful enough and the machine had no storage capacity. To top it off, the Japanese company’s licensing program was restrictive and expensive. Yet Nintendo was a behemoth, with an unbelievably tight
lock on the vast majority of the home videogame market in North America. Hawkins’s
Glückschmerz
grew by the day.