Can a Computer Make You Cry? The Rock-Star Idea Behind EA's Birth

Early in Electronic Arts' life, a magazine advert asked a question no games company had dared to put in a headline: "Can a computer make you cry?" It ran in Scientific American, a magazine whose readers, as founder Trip Hawkins later admitted, were not really playing video games. He joked that EA was competing with BMW for that ad space.

It was an expensive mistake, and also a perfect statement of what EA was trying to be. Today Electronic Arts is one of the biggest publishers in the world. In 1982 it was a small start-up with a big romantic idea: that people who made games were artists, and should be sold like rock stars.

From Apple to Amazin' Software

Trip Hawkins joined Apple in 1978, when it had about fifty employees, and rose to director of product marketing. He watched the personal computer go from hobby to business and became convinced that home computers would be a new medium for entertainment.

He left to start his own company and incorporated it on May 27, 1982, with an estimated $200,000 of his own money. Its first name was Amazin' Software. The early staff disliked it, and in November 1982 it became Electronic Arts.

His closest partner was Bing Gordon, his longtime friend and right-hand man, who later summed up the plan: EA wanted to make games for 28-year-olds when everybody else was making games for 13-year-olds.

Software artists and album covers

Hawkins called EA's developers "software artists", and the company built its brand around them. Instead of the usual flimsy boxes, early EA games came in square packages modelled on record album sleeves, with liner notes and photos of the designers. Titles such as M.U.L.E. and Pinball Construction Set, both released in 1983, arrived looking more like LPs than toys.

The back of each box described EA not as a company but as "a collection of electronic artists who share a common goal to fulfill the potential of personal computing". The idea was that you would follow designers the way you followed bands.

It did not always work. Hawkins sent programmer Bill Budge, creator of Pinball Construction Set and the EA designer who "most naturally resembled a rock star", on an autograph tour of software stores and shopping malls. Nobody showed up.

From art to sports

The "software artist" era did not last forever. EA's first internally developed game was Skate or Die! in 1987, and a deal with football coach John Madden produced what became the annual Madden NFL series. Sports games, licensed and released every year, turned out to be the steadiest money in the business, and they reshaped the company far more than album covers ever did.

Hawkins stepped down as chief executive in 1991, handing the job to Larry Probst, and remained chairman until 1994. He went on to found The 3DO Company, which made a console and later games before closing in 2003. Probst ran EA until 2007, during the years it became a giant.

Why it matters

The question in that old advert still hangs over the industry. Games now regularly make people cry, and the people who make them are celebrated at awards shows and on credits screens. That was not obvious in 1982, and EA's early marketing helped make the argument.

At the same time, EA's later history became a byword for the opposite: annual sports releases, big licences, and business models critics call too aggressive. In August 2026, the company completed its sale to a group led by Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners, and left the Nasdaq after more than three decades as a public company.

WGC's take: Trip Hawkins' best idea was not the album box. It was the belief that the people who make games deserve to be known. Every developer name on a modern trailer owes a little to a 1980s ad that nobody in its target audience ever saw.

For another founding story from the same era, read how Nintendo went from card maker to games giant.