Electronic Arts

GameSpy: Who started your company and in what year?

Bing Gordon – President :: Trip Hawkins was the founder, visionary, and original chairman and CEO. In November 1982, the company was incorporated as Electronic Arts. Eleven employees then, including me. The only other original EA employee still involved is Tim Mott, who now sits on EA’s board of directors.

GameSpy: How did you decide on your company name?

Bing Gordon: Trip had named the company “Amazin’ Software.” The rest of us hated that.

Our advertising group, who later became Goodby, Silverstein and Partners, Ad Agency magazine’s choice for agency of the year in the late 80’s, proposed naming the company “Softart,” with a goal of creating games that lived up to the emotions and aesthetic quality of other art forms. But the name was taken.

In an all-company discussion, the name choices came down to Electronic Artists and Electronic Arts, the latter name proposed by Tim Mott. Steve Hayes, a founding engineer, said “We’re not the artists, they are.” (For its first 5 years, EA only published outside work.) And that argument swayed the rest of us.

GameSpy: How did you decide on the logo and are you still using the original? If it is not the original logo, what prompted you to change it?

Bing Gordon: Original Logo, which some people saw as “ECA” blocks, was designed by SF designer Barry Deutsch, to represent the 3 basic shapes of graphics: square, circle, and triangle, and in their 3D forms, cube, sphere, and tetrahedron. He rasterized the shapes to look modern.

We have changed the original logo in the past year to a cleaner looking EA, as the parent brand for ea sports, ea.com and ea games.