There once was a time when I pictured Electronic Arts, and all my imagination could muster was this dreary, impossibly-tall tower complex. It was nestled in the clouds, and constantly blanketed by a storm. At the top of this complex sat an overweight man in a three-piece suit, I could picture him slovenly choking down currency like some sort of executive Jabba the Hutt. The mind works in mysterious ways. Lucidly I knew what I thought of EA, and it wouldn’t take a protege of Freud to figure those daydreams out. But, how does one of the most hated companies in the gaming industry turn itself around so quickly? A company who based a few decades of its existence on cashing-in, how does it become so credible? At what point can you draw the line at a person’s wrong doings, and give them credit for turning their life around? I’m not sure when or how it happened, but in the past few years I’ve started to like EA.
I think we all can associate some hatred to at least one or two of the EA Sports franchises, which were persistently relatable to fecal matter. Year after year the company sold us games bloated with official-this and licensed-that, and inevitably those games rode on the waves of their own associations, aggrivating gamers who were so hopeful that this year would be better than the last, surely? It wasn’t. Then there’s franchises, such as Medal of Honour and Need for Speed, that went from respectable to downright abused. You would anticipate that a company with the name Electronic Arts would have some fundamental belief in digital artistry, I guess it comes as no surprise that somewhere along the line they dropped a whole mess of letters and settled on the simple acronym, EA. Perhaps this was as much a result of some residual guilt than it was a marketing strategy.
Fast-forward a mere few years and suddenly EA is one of the most revered mainstream icons in the gaming industry. Very suddenly it has placed an emphasis on giving new IPs a chance, and breathing life into their previously stale franchises. In the past year or so alone we’ve seen Crysis, Spore, Mirror’s Edge, Dead Space, and Burnout Paradise come through the company. Games which, at one point, EA would have passed on. These are games heralded for their re-imagining of a certain genre or direction, and while, if Mirror’s Edge is any example to go by, some may not nail the formula first time around, it seems all the more likely that EA are more than willing to give them some breathing space and allow them to grow into potentially incredible artifacts of gaming.
And then there’s EA Sports. If you’d have travelled back from the future, sat me down some three or four years ago, and told me that come 2008 EA Sports would be king of the sports gaming hill, I would have laughed in your face, thrown you back in your budget-Delorean, and politely waved you off as you tried to hit 88 MPH before crashing into a building. For one company to go from creating the worst entrants into practically every sporting genre, to creating the best, in what seems like such a short space of time is unthinkable. FIFA, Madden, NHL, Fight Night, even Skate, have all become triple-A titles. Of course, in the case of Madden there’s a grey area to dwell on. it has no competition in the form of a shared license, as it does with 2K Sports’ NHL and NBA games. But a license doesn’t necessarily make a game, as has been the proof with previous EA titles, and no developers from leftfield have tried to contest Madden for gameplay, it’s only competition being its little brother, NCAA Football.
Please don’t read into this article as a love letter to the artist formerly known as Electronic Arts. I recognize that for all of the company’s recent investments in creativity and innovation, at its root it still, to some extent, relies on high-profile, shoddy franchises and licenses to pay its bills (Harry Potter stinks, and Need for Speed continues to be frustratingly inconsistent). But the ratio of good to bad has tipped for the better, I feel. Hopefully EA continues to use that dirty money it amassed to let new ideas and initiatives flourish, and perhaps in a few years we can all learn to forget the horrible crimes it committed against gaming.
