"The Ultimate History of Video Games" - Relevant Highlights

"The Birth of Electronic Arts"

-Founder: Trip Hawkins. Not only brilliant but stylish and handsome. A Harvard and Stanford Graduate where he researched "personal computing" (Kent, 261). Used this as "an excuse to call up every company in the business. [He] got to know all the pioneers in the business at the time ... guys like Steve Jobs... That's how [he] got in for [his] job at Apple" (Kent, 261-262).

-Became a multi-millionaire when Apple went public. Met Don Valentine and began creating is company. Gained interest by promoting designers, a new way of packaging games -"Album Covers" (263), and began changing the industry rules by offering retailers a lower discount for EA games.

-1984, Hawkins focused more on promoting games over designers. That same year, EA gains the rights to use Julius Irving's name and likeness in a basketball game.

"Nintendo Loses Square"
-During the late 90’s, “Nintendo lost an important third-party partner called Square Soft,” which specialized in RPG’s (Kent, 539).

-The most popular Square Soft game was “’Final Fantasy,’ created by Hironobu Sakaguchi, one of the world’s most respected game designers” (Kent, 540).

- Did not originally start out creating RPG’s but wanted to write something more exciting. “Since he planned to quit making games after the first RPG, Sakaguchi named his game ‘Final Fantasy’” (Kent, 540).
-“The basic concept was really a mythical concept of the whole earth, with fire and water representing everything on earth. I took that concept and represented those elements into a crystal, and that essentially became sort of the core theme for ‘Final Fantasy.’ I took a preexisting idea – the four or five basic elements of the world; sort of an orthodox and mythical concept – then molded it into an original fantasy story” (Sakaguchi quoted in Kent, 540).
-Became a huge success and introduced to the US. RPG’s were still more popular in Japan.
-Square Soft switches to Sony mostly due to more “artistic freedom” (Kent, 542).