Beyond the woke shit they do EA has been an anti-consumer dumpster fire for as long as I've been aware of them (about 12 years now). I was (and still am) a huge Sims 3 player, and there's all kinds of unethical shit they did with that over a decade ago even if it doesn't hold a candle to the shit they do now. They also destroyed the SimCity franchise by sabotaging SimCity 2013 and then scapegoating Maxis so they would have an excuse to destroy it. I played SimCity 4 which was decent, and SimCity 2000 was released before Maxis was bought out. For those of you who are older or have been following this stuff longer than I have, was EA ever a good company or have they been scamming their customers from the beginning?
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I vaguely remember a time where you placed the game into the console and played the games. Wasn't any EA signups, company rules, TOS, but those are vague memories
Tell us more about the before time, in the long, long ago.
It was pretty good. They also very rarely had any game-breaking bugs and no day 1 patches.
It was a great time. A wonderful time. A time of intros that say "EA Games. Challenge everything." A time of yellow tabs on Sega cartridges. Login requirements weren't on the minds of developers. ToS at the beginning of games were non-existent. If you wanted to play against other players, they had to be right next to you. Shit talking was face to face and not censored.
Times have changed, young one. Now we pray for the death of this hobby.
I have some fond memories of NHL games. But it was still a sell-you-a-new-game-every-year scam.
NHL 2004 is to this day the only mainline sports game I've ever played (save for stuff like Wii Sports that I put in a different category). My dad and I would play each other all the time back in the day. Never touched any other modes.
Once upon a time they published some incredible games and were dare I post it, normal in their business practices but it was around the time that Bioware got bought up they started making some very unusual moves and went down the route they have now. I think that the buyouts were potentially them setting up for everything we see happening today, especially when it comes to the woke pandering.
EA is the Disney of video gaming. Everything good they've ever put out was created by an affiliate or subsidiary studio that they bought. As soon as EA itself assumed more direct control over games development, everything went to shit. Dragon Age is just one example: Origins was good because BioWare were already developing it when EA bought them. Then there's the sequels.
Back in the days of Battlefield and battlefront, yeah, ea was awesome. E-A GAMES challenge everything
You could grab a cd from staples, and...that's it. No micro transactions or accounts necessary.
I can tell you something funny, it used to be the LA BRANCH of EA used to be the best part.
They were responsible for Red Alert 3 and when Battlefield 4 was released in it's buggy state, they worked to fix it and even add on community maps that it became one of the best Battlefield games.
But that time has long past, I'd say one of the things that sort of unintentionally put them on this path was ME3 multiplayer. It seemed a bit of an after thought but it became REALLY popular and had a loot box system to getting characters and weapons which they've done in their sports games but this was the first time it was accepted in a non sport game.
After that, they tried injecting it into EVERY game they made and it was when the decline really accelerated...
Battlefield 4? EA was known as an anti-consumer corp before BF3 ever came out. As mentioned trash tier yearly release sports games with an assload of DLCs were a thing for years beforehand, and IIRC they even had a thing where online multiplayer only worked on BC2 if you bought the game new - there was an activation code in the box, and if you bought used you had to pay them for a new one.
True but it they still made products everyone liked which balanced it out.
I maintain after ME3, you saw a major sift in game design that became EVEN more predatory.
Always an evil company, but they at least used to be an effective company.
EA published some amazing games back in the day from companies like Bullfrog. The early 90s EA sports like Madden and NHL were amazing. But even then, I'm sure they still had their share of corporate shenanigans.
Everyone here seems to be reminiscing about newer EA, so in case you aren't familiar with Bullfrog, check out their list of epic games.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions
I have Syndicate and Syndicate Wars, I am very well aware of what Bullfrog was. Just one of many great studios that are now defunct or part of the borg. Origin, Looking Glass, Epyx, Microprose, the list is long and distinguished.
The last syndicate wars mission was so epic with two squads full of chem-jacked super-agents doing plasma cannon drivebys from flying cars.
Another old guy with excellent taste. 👌
BF 1942 and the original Bard's Tale were good. But one of those is 22 years old and the other is 39. I'm sure there are some other pre 2010 EA games that were fun, I just don't remember them
Looking up the list, I can add the Ultima Series, Command and Conquer, Dungeon Keeper, Mirror's Edge, Might and Magic, and Black and White.
Looking through the lists, it seems they stopped making good games sometime around 2007-9.
2007 was when John Riccitiello took over, so it's pretty likely that he is responsible for its downfall. He is one of those nomadic CEOs that jumps from megacorp to megacorp.
In the BF1942 era, the issue was CD checks. I remember having to go to gamecopyworld to download no-cd cracks for games that I had paid for because the cd check lagged or sometimes didn't work at all.
Like many companies back before the Internet became a big popular thing used by many they had hits and misses depending on what you liked and how you interfaced with it.
They were a grand company (As were Codemasters, BioWare, Maxis and others before they got grouped together) but lost their way with gamers like me around the mid-90's - mid-2000's. Once SecuROM was put in Spore in 2008 I dropped them altogether as a reliable company and haven't touched them since.
But they have grown, as has the userbase, since then and that's all fine. I'd rather play indie games or games which don't require me to know the rules of how to purchase and play prior to playing a game.
I bought GTA 4 legit and then pirated a copy to play it without the Games for Windows nonsense which was forced on. EA never had anything I wanted to play and so I've not done that with them but I can guess others could do similar to what I did just to bypass the rubbish that legitimate customers play with which pirated copies don't have on them.
I think so, but it's been a really long time now. And they've been at least a little sketchy even before that.
But there was a time where they were turning out some beloved classics. Battlefield 1942 was published by EA, for example.
And, just going off the wiki; Alice, Command & Conquer, Dead Space, Star Wars: Battlefront, and a lot of racing games and sports games back when they didn't suck as hard.
EA back in the day were almost the BEST company - that was in the 80's. And ignoring the micro transactions - FIFA is still the best soccer game
Yup, the original Road Rash trilogy was amazing, along with games like Skitchin'.
Their Mutant League games were also awesome and different from everything else out at the time. Even their sports titles used to be good. The Strike trilogy, consisting of Desert, Jungle, and Urban Strike, were all solid games and pushed the boundaries of the hardware with each outing.
They got kind of stale toward the end of the 90s and early aughts, but they also had one of the best third-person, action-stealth, cinematic adventure games ever made: 007: Everything or Nothing.
If you can find a copy of that gem it's pure 007 bliss. It's everything a James Bond game should be, hot birds like Shannon Elizabeth and Heidi Klum, a cool villain with Willem Dafoe, and they combined a lot of their tech into one game, utilising Need For Speed's driving mechanics for the driving sections.
The Pontchartrain Bridge level is still one of the best action set pieces ever devised in any video game. I would definitely advise you to play the game instead of just looking it up on YouTube because playing it is well worth it.
Plus, I really liked the melee combat and co-op mode. The co-op was actually about as good as Splinter Cell Chaos Theory's co-op, since it had its own unique set of levels that played adjacent to the main Everything or Nothing story.
Oh, and it had a ton of unlockables and hidden secrets you could acquire just by playing through the game. That was peak EA right there -- great graphics, great gameplay, great level design, awesome cinematics, and highly replayable.
After that is when EA kind of nestled back into their typical evil ways. They made a lacklustre and completely pointless remake of From Russia With Love; it's more polished than Everything or Nothing but also more soulless, boring, and less mechanically diverse. I can't remember, but I think they axed the co-op too.
From there it was a steady decline into boring annual sports ball titles, usurping popular studios and gutting them after having them churn out soulless cash grabs, and some occasional licenced products that no one cared about. But to answer your question, no... EA was not always evil and crappy. They used to make high-quality and innovative games for a short time, including some counter-culture titles. A real shame about what happened to them after Riccitiello took over in the mid-to-late aughts.
Kudos for mentioning the Strike games. Soviet Strike was also excellent but I never got to play Nuclear Strike.
EA was largely a byword for quality in the 90s, publisher or in-house.
Oh I forgot about the Strike games on the other systems, you're right. Soviet Strike was on the PSX? Or was that Nuclear Strike? I lost track of them after the newer consoles came out back in the 90s.
PSX and Saturn, yeah, I played SS on the Saturn. Saturn usually had the inferior versions of 3D games, but sometimes was superior when it came to 2D. [EDIT looked it up and apparently the Saturn version was the later, superior version, due to bugfixes and additions. Although I have my doubts about that when it comes to frame rate] I've been on a bit of an emulating kick lately, so I'm tempted to go back and revisit the series. Nuclear never made it to Saturn.
The game Future Cop: LAPD also supposedly started life in development as Future Strike, a final unreleased Strike game. I've never played it.
Soviet Strike was underrated imo. The 3D was a bit jank and jerky, but you got used to it in that era. They made up for it with the effort that went into the mission presentation. Every campaign and every mission had their own little bit of live acted FMV featuring your team of helper operatives. But not only that, even every enemy and resource pickup had their own FMV vids explaining them and those changed every mission, eg. on a mission in russia you might get 15 seconds of general grizzleface warning about the soviet chopper fuel you'll have to resort to picking up. 45 minutes total of fmvs, I loved shit like that back in the day.
Oh that's a good call. I use my Steamdeck mostly for emulation, I might get a copy of the Strike games and Future Cop LAPD for the PSX emu (I originally didn't like Future Cop when it first released, but I, too, have been replaying a ton of older games and revisiting my impressions on them, so I might enjoy it this time around after I finish Oni).
And it's also funny because I used to have a love/hate relationship with FMV back in the day (loved how it featured real people but didn't really like the grainy look), but I really appreciate it a lot more now than before due to how soulless and uninspired a lot of cinematics are these days. It's one of the reasons I've really enjoyed Ross' Game Dungeon as he plays plenty classic games that really made a mark back in the 1990s with the grainy yet inviting FMV sequencing. It really gives me a great sense of nostalgia.
I always associate Things starting to get really bad around the time of Mass Effect 2, or just after. Dragon Age 2 is the first game of theirs I consciously skipped.
Some EA games were outstanding and memorable. But as we're learning, the ins and outs of being run by EA was pretty horrible overall. From the working conditions to the crunch times to meet crazy deadlines. In this way, EA feels a bit like Activision.
Activision was created because they didn't like Atari's contracts and rules. So they went off and formed their own company, and became worse than they escaped from over time.
Looking back, and simplyfying a whole hell of a lot, EA is like a bigger budget LJN. They don't make games, they just contract out to the studios they own, or will own, and have them make some great games.
I still have fond memories of playing Road Rash, B.O.B, NHL 94, and General Chaos. It's a shame they were likely made under those circumstances.
EA once held the Jane’s Combat Simulations license, and from the early 90’s through 2000 made some really excellent combat related games. The Crown Jewels in the series were Jane’s F-15 and it’s successor Jane’s F/A-18. They, along with Microprose’s Falcon 4.0 were the finest and most realistic home flight simulators up to that point. Dubbed “study sims” F/A-18 was so detailed and so well done that the U.S. Navy used it as a procedural trainer. Jane’s Fleet Command is still available, I think on Steam, and is a very fun strategy game.
ah-64d longbow
They ruined Ultima Online 25 years ago
The oldest Electronic Arts game I played was Earth Orbit Stations for the Apple IIe.
Save scumming was pretty much mandatory. EOS had a very evil RNG about how successful rocket launches would be. With budgeting and time restrictions being super tight, one launch fuckup could bring the whole house of cards down. Imagine kerbal but less of a lego set and more of a roguelike.
I'm told it is possible to accomplish the mars rescue mission without save hacking but I never pulled it off.
Some of the LotR games they published were pretty good. Those and some of the lesser Westwood-based games are probably the last few positive EA games I can think of.
And I don't really count any of the good Bioware games since those franchises started turning to shit almost the moment EA started getting involved.
There is a reason why everyone can hear E A SPORTS as I type it.
You used to pretty much be able to count on getting a pretty decent game if you say the old cube - sphere - tetrahedron logo printed on the box. As a publisher they delivered both original and home ports with games like MULE, Mail Order Monsters, Marble Madness, Skate or Die (in-house developed), Bard's Tale, Populous, Shadow of the Beast, The Immortal, Syndicate, lots of titles I remember fondly from the 80s. 90s had Road Rash, Cyberia, Need for Speed, and of course the decent Sim City games.
Of course, they often didn't have exclusive rights so sometimes you'd see different platforms have different publishers for the same game, but even if EA pushed out a game for a platform I didn't own, I generally paid attention to the title.
Today? Your post is the last time I thought about them in a long time.
I can tell you the exact moment they went bad. Trip Hawkins started the company, and ran it fairly well until the 3DO. When the 3DO failed, Trip was kicked out but given a large enough parachute it didn't bother him too much. However, the People running EA started telling everyone that he wasn't the founding member. They kept claiming themselves. Up to that point the company had problems but could be respectful, and then lost all care except status after that.
Yes. A long long time ago, when their logo looked like this: https://retrocollector.org/publishers/41.png
If I told you that Electronic Arts was founded by Apple employees, would that explain things?
They started to go wrong in the early 90s, once they got involved with console gaming and thanks to their experience with Madden NFL games that they published. Their business practices bent during the 90s to reflect those insights, and how they could cannibalize take over targets for IP and brain power. By the time they gobbled up companies like BioWare, they had long been evil, 100%, and the rest is history.
But there was a time during the 80s that they were actually quite a good company, from a gamer's perspective.
Sims 3 was my guilty pleasure.
Graphics had gotten good enough.
Never bothered with the following ones. Their DLCs totalling thousands $ basically trolling.
The LOTR games from EA around 2002~2006 were pretty good, and while some were less canon than others, cough cough Third Age what the fuck cough cough, overall they were still fun games that didn't hate the world they were set in nor the person playing.