Electronic Arts

Electronic Arts (EA) is an American developer, marketer, publisher and distributor of computer and video games, established in 1982 by Trip Hawkins. Although EA was solely a publisher for home computers for its first few years, by the late 1980s the company was developing PC games in-house, and by the early 1990s they started to support consoles.

Also in the 1990s, EA began to expand by acquiring several successful developers and, as by the early 2000s, EA became the world's largest third-party publisher, with some of the most successful products including sports games published under their EA Sports label, games from long-running franchises (for example, The Sims, Need for Speed and Medal of Honor), and games based on popular movie licenses.

The brand architecture of Electronic Arts consists of the following:

• EA (all non-sports titles) The simple EA brand replaced EA Games in 2005
• EA Sports (realistic sports simulations)
• EA Sports BIG (extreme sports titles)
• EA Mobile (mobile phone and iPod games, previously "JAMDAT")
• Maxis (Life simulation titles) Produces games with the "Sims" title (such as SimCity and The Sims)
• Pogo.com (online games site, with numerous EA brand tie-ins)

EA also operates the games channel on AOL.

Notable Games

Some of the most popular and notable games of video game history have been published or developed by EA; many of these are listed below.

• Pinball Construction Set (1982) by Bill Budge
• Archon (1983) by Free Fall Associates
• M.U.L.E. (1983), by Dani Bunten and Ozark Softscape
• One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird (1983) by Eric Hammond
• Music Construction Set (1984) by Will Harvey
• Archon II: Adept (1984) by Free Fall Associates
• The Seven Cities of Gold (1984), by Dani Bunten and Ozark Softscape
• The Bard's Tale (1985), by Interplay Productions
• Mail Order Monsters (1985) by Paul Reiche III, Evan Robinson and Nicky Robinson
• Racing Destruction Set (1985) by Rick Koenig
• Starflight (1986), by Binary Systems
• Heart of Africa (1987), by Dani Bunten and Ozark Softscape
• Skate or Die! (1987), EA's first internally - developed title
• Populous (1989), by Bullfrog which EA acquired in 1995
• Need for Speed series (1994 - current)
• Ultima Online (1997), by Origin Systems
• Command & Conquer series (titles from 1999 - current), by Westwood Studios (earlier titles released by Virgin Interactive)
• SimCity series (titles from 1999 - current), by Maxis (earlier titles released by other publishers)
• Medal of Honor series (1999 - current)
• The Sims series (2000 - current)
• The Sims 2 series (2004 - current)
• Battlefield series (2002 - current)