The eternal EA loading screen for the Commodore 64, 1984

Electronic Arts - Seeing Farther

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Electronic Arts - 1982 to Present

So Mote It Be: Developing Computer Game Archon The Light and the Dark

Snap of Archon: The Light and the Dark, a computer game for the C64 by EA 1983

Facing off in Archon: The Light and the Dark

Screencap from Star Wars, a science fiction film from 1977

Archon inspiration from Star Wars: A New Hope – Let the wookie win

For Free Fall’s first Electronic Arts game, the team is inspired by that greatest of all strategic games: Chess. Blending in a taste of sword and sorcery chess sets and Freeman’s remembrances of participating in large outdoor chess matches with humans as pieces, along with a nod to the holographic chess set featured in Star Wars, they start work on Archon: The Light and the Dark. As part of Electronic Arts’ system of assigning producers to projects, Joe Ybarra helps guide the game’s development, as well as serving as a vehement game tester. The balancing act for the designers is to create a deep strategy game, while still offering enough excitement to appease twitchy action gamers. Archon features 18 fantasy creature pieces to a side, with different real-time attacks and spells available to rain down upon your opponent.

Click the button to play Archon: The Light and the Dark for Atari 8-bit by Free Fall Associates, 1983

The game is originally conceived as a two-player exercise, but near the end of its development, EA requests a one-player mode which extends production time. It is released for the Atari 8-bit computers in May of 1983, with a C64 version by Free Fall following in October. The developer prefers to let EA farm out their game’s conversions to other computer platforms like the IBM PC and Apple II. Archon is a big hit, spending a long time perched in the Top 20 software lists, and Hawkins wants a sequel. But instead of producing a quickie knock-off by simply adding a few new creatures, Free Fall works out a different yet similar concept with an altered game field, more and varied creatures, and new spells and skills. Archon II: Adept is released in 1984 for Electronic Arts, receiving even more acclaim than the original, as well as debuting in the top 10 of Billboard Magazine’s list of best-selling video games.

Click the button to play Archon II: Adept by Free Fall Associates for the C64

Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall of Free Fall Associates, makers of games for EA

Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall play a little Archon, 1984 image

Produced concurrently with the original Archon is Murder on the Zinderneuf, designed by Freeman and Reiche, with Robert Leyland programming. Leyland himself had come from Automated Simulations/Epyx, having made Dragon’s Eye and Alien Garden there. In Zinderneuf, players take the role of one of eight thinly-disguised famous fictional sleuths, with names like Miss Agatha Marbles, Emile Klutizeau and Achille Merlot, and attempt to solve a murder case aboard a giant blimp. They have 12 hours (about 35 real-time minutes) to solve the mystery before the zeppelin lands and the killer revealed by the game. It’s a revolutionary game in that the plot and the sixteen characters you encounter on the blimp are shuffled around every time you play, making for a totally new gaming experience with every reload. Free Fall Associates trods the checkerboard floor again with Archon Ultra for SSi in 1994, adding online play to the mix. They eventually move into playing card games, with a game system titled Thrall. With both solitaire and online multiplayer modes, the games are featured prominently on Prodigy’s GameTV service.

Click the button to play Mail Order Monsters for the good old Commodore 64

As for former Free Fall partner Paul Reiche III, in 1985, eight years before Pokemon is unleashed onto the world, he along with Evan and Nicky Robinson make Mail Order Monsters, where players grow creatures with a wide variety of available skills and physical attributes inside genetic vats, who then battle against each other in different arena environments. Reiche then goes on to found game company Toys for Bob along with Fred Ford, developing the first two hit games in the Star Control series for Accolade.

Going Farther: Electronic Arts Sells Its Vision

"We See Farther" magazine ad for Electronic Arts

One of the famous “We See Farther” ads

EA starts shipping their first games on May 20, 1983. The entire 30-odd staff members including Hawkins go down to the South San Francisco warehouse and hand-package the initial available games, including Archon: The Light and the Dark, M.U.L.E., Pinball Construction Set and Hard Hat Mack . When a retailer comes by to pick up his order, it is personally handed to him by Hawkins. The crew gets a treat for their hard work: Hawkins has rented out an entire theatre, and the gang watches a special showing of Return of the Jedi, which the general public isn’t able to see for another five days. Along with the Atari 8-bit computer systems and the Apple II, the software company creates some of the most popular and ingenious programs for the C64 during its astronomic rise, by some of the most talented designers and programmers around. The new vision of Electronic Arts is heralded by the famous We See Farther magazine ads, with headlines like “Can a computer make you cry?”. These and later magazine ads are lavishly produced, featuring photos of the game designers taken by a rock album cover photographer over the course of an all-day photo shoot in San Francisco. Under the guidance of art director Nancy L. Fong, Electronic Arts revolutionizes the way computer games are packaged, presented in 9″ x 9″ square folded “record albums”, constructed from heavy cardboard with colourful covers and fanciful instruction manuals and liner notes inside. The look of the packaging is not a coincidence; it’s meant to appeal to teenagers, the same demographic that buys a lot of record albums. EA promotes the game developers like rockstars and software “composers”, with extensive author images and bios prominently displayed. The music industry analogy is further continued in  EA’s talent contract, an amalgam of computer and music industry legal boilerplate. It also pioneers the idea of paying video game developers who have proven themselves in the field with advances against future royalties collected through sales of the products they produce. All this in the face of Electronic Art’s first board of directors, who, according to Bing Gordon, in 1983 tell the execs that they should stop striving to establish a brand identity for EA because, “You can’t brand media.”

EA We See Farther ad

Electronic Arts uses the Rock Album metaphor: part of the We See Farther campaign

As well as financial compensation, EA also strives to facilitate easier and quicker design workflow for its software artists by providing technology such as compilers, tools that allow designers to work in a higher-level language which is ultimately converted to the more difficult machine language understood by the computer. Graphic, audio and interface tools are also developed for the use of game designers, in a system that EA dubs the Artist Work Station, or AWS. Some other tools are utilized in the company’s novel stress-release program; employees are issued Nerf guns to take out their frustrations, and offices littered with Nerf balls is a common sight. Michael Kosaka, coming to EA in 1987 after working at Data Age, Atari and Epyx, becomes EA’s first internal game designer, and also creates and heads up EA’s first internal computer graphics art staff.

Video game designer Dan Bunten

Game designer supreme Dan Bunten holds three of his early works for SSi, 1983

A Software Artist: Dan Bunten and Ozark Softscape

In 1974 Dan Bunten is an industrial engineer graduate living in Little Rock, Arkansas, working as a management systems engineer designing mathematical system models under a grant from the National Science Foundation. Having been an avid board game player with his many siblings in his youth, in his off time he designs text-based computer games, the first of which is an Apple II business management game made in 1978 called Wheeler Dealers, with one of the aspects of the game being a 4-player, real-time auction. Canada’s Speakeasy Software, based in Kemptville, Ontario,  publishes the game as a 16K cassette at a then-astronomic price of $54 dollars apiece. It is one of the first software titles that comes packed in a dedicated box, in order to house the included adapter, designed by Bunten, to allow up to 4 players to play on one computer. This at a time when computer games are a solitary affair, come in zip-lock bags and sell for around $15. Only 150 copies of Wheeler Dealers eventually sell, but it manages to attract the attention of Trip Hawkins, a founding board member of SSI. Electronic Arts buys a minority stake in SSi in 1979, with Hawkins’ company gaining the rights to distribute SSi software in the U.S. and Canada. The same year, Bunten makes Computer Quarterback, a text-based football simulation designed for his friends to play and sold to SSI, becoming one of their best-selling games up to that point. Bunten then makes Cartels & Cutthroats for the company, allowing up to 6 players on an Apple IICytron Masters is the final game Bunten does for SSi, released under their RapidFire game line, an attempt to pivot to more action-oriented fare a la Automated Simulations and their Epyx label .

Click the button to play Cytron Masters on Apple IIe

Cytron represents nearly eight months of development time on the Apple II, and is Bunten’s attempt at creating a graphical real-time strategy game that also offers a two-player mode. Released in 1982 for the Apple II and later converted to the Atari 800, Cytron is Bunten’s first game with graphics, and by this time he has gathered a core team of three – brother Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, and Alan Watson – collectively known as Ozark Softscape. Hawkins, now running Electronic Arts, tries to get the rights to sell Cartels & Cutthroats, but SSI won’t let it go. Bunten convinces Hawkins that he can do a better version of the game for EA, and under the auspices of producer Joe Ybarra, nine months later M.U.L.E. is born for the Atari 8-bit computer line.

Liner notes for M.U.L.E.. L. to R.: Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, Alan Watson and Dan Bunten

Liner notes for M.U.L.E.. L. to R.: Bill Bunten, Jim Rushing, Alan Watson and Dan Bunten.  Buntens’ sister Theresa far left

44 Acres and a M.U.L.E.

Along with economics of Cartels & Cutthroats, the new game is also heavily influenced by Parker Brothers’ timeless board game MonopolySo much so, in fact, that M.U.L.E. features a “Species Selection” screen, where players can pick their favourite character to play with, akin to choosing a favourite metal token at the start of the famous board game. Bunten and his team have also pinpointed that the real joy in playing Monopoly is the dealing and collusion that goes on between players outside of the game board, and so do their best to program this kind of flexibility into the game. To further the Monopoly analogy: players engage in acquiring land plots (real estate) and are subject to the vagaries of random events (Chance cards). M.U.L.E. computer game play also circles around the real-time auctions that had featured so prominently in Wheeler Dealers. The inspiration for the plot and setting comes from the Robert A. Heinlein novel Time Enough For Love, read by both Bunten brothers, where colonists on another world use bio-engineered mules to settle the landscape and build a functioning economy. In the game these mules become the Multiple Use Labor Elements of the title. Their shape is taken from a foot high AT-AT Walker model from The Empire Strikes Back that Alan Watson’s son possesses, with some jovial head-bobbing added to its animation to make it a bit friendlier-looking. The game is initially referred to internally by Ozark Softscape as Planet Pioneers, but they eventually fall in love (or hate, depending on how they behave out in the field) with the little mules in the game, and so ultimately label the game with the acronym M.U.L.E. Electronic Arts, on the other hand, wants to officially saddle the game with the unfortunate name Moguls from Mars. Ozark’s title thankfully wins out after the developer shows EA management the impressive M.U.L.E. title screen, with the title character ambling across.

Bunten’s history as a systems engineer really comes through in the design of the M.U.L.E. computer game, especially in what’s happening under the hood. As players acquire plots of land on the colony planet of Irata (read that backwards) and start producing commodities to buy and sell in the real-time auctions, a remarkable economic simulation begins to take effect. Real economic theories, such as Scarcity, Supply and Demand, Economies of Scale, Production Learning Curve, Diminishing Returns, The Prisoner’s Dilemma and even Market Collusion all come into play, depending on player actions. Up to four people can crowd around the computer to try and game the Irata economy; this is easily facilitated by the four joystick ports on the Atari 800 home computer, but more cumbersome when attempted with only two joysticks on a system like the later C64 computer version. There, two people have to bunch up at the keyboard and use a group of keys on either side. Of course, this close proximity makes it easier for full-contact responses to any egregious economic actions by fellow colonists as gameplay unfolds. Players must be careful to avoid cornering the market too much, and not just due to the risk of getting punched by an aggravated co-colonist: following the plotline from Heinlein’s book, a minimum production capacity of the settlement as a whole must be met, or else be considered a fail condition and the whole group refused inclusion in the planetary Federation of the game. For those lacking enough willing human participants, the CPU can take up the slack for any empty player slots.

All the economic chicanery and colonist backbiting is coated by a breezy and accessible art style from Alan Watson. Accompanying this is a jaunty rock theme commissioned from Roy Glover, and which later gives Dan Bunten a slight pause as it becomes the more memorable part of the game for some. It certainly becomes an ear worm for Wil Wright, a fellow game-god who slips the M.U.L.E. theme into the soundtrack of his 2008 epic Spore, where one can hear it in, apropos, the game’s space-faring section as players seek out new worlds to colonize.

Click the button to play the marvellous M.U.L.E. on the Atari 800 computer

Released in 1983, only 30,000 copies of M.U.L.E. are sold, however. This relative lack of sales is not a true symbol of the game’s success, as its market is initially limited to Atari’s fading 8-bit computers. It also has to be in the top three of the most pirated games in computer history, especially on the C64 computer platform where it becomes a classic piece of gaming software.

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