EA Blames its Success on its Amiga Failures!

[itix]

Why not read article before making your wrong conclusions?

"When we built Amiga titles for the first time, we were coming out of the 8-bit world; we were building some IBM PC stuff, but for the most part it wasn't high quality, relatively high resolution high color stuff. And so the Amiga, for us, taught us a whole bunch of new things. We had to get good at music, we had to get much better at art, we had to get better animation that wasn't all sprite animation, we had to do 3D for the first time -- a whole bunch of things that we had to do."

Unfortunately, says Hilleman, "None of that paid off except Deluxe Paint, really, in the Amiga world."

[Duce]

Marble Madness was the game that made me choose an Amiga over a PC, Mac or ST, tbh.

Loved it.  Hated Archon though.

[Bif]

This thread made me realize that Marble Madness was one of the couple of things I saw demoed at the computer store which lured me to the Amiga. And when I finally bought my first Amiga, the two pieces of software I picked up with it were Deluxe Music Construction Set and Bard's Tale II. I was quite happy with all this EA software. I then actually spent most of my working life at EA , interesting how it came full circle without realizing it.

[Crisisdog]

Marble Madness was the game that made me choose an Amiga over a PC, Mac or ST, tbh.

Loved it.  Hated Archon though.

I liked Archon for its improved graphics over the previous Apple II version that I used to play (again, how are improved graphics "bad"?), but it was a huge pain in the butt to control with a standard Atari style joystick when the Apple II had an analoge joystick .

[dreamcast270mhz]

Heheh. Well it seems EA never really tries with anything it seems, all of their games have been, in my experience, lackluster. The Saturn ports of their sports games weren't bad, but they were direct PS1 ports. The saturn has the unique ability,unlike the PS1, of using  low-resource techniques better. Take NBA live 98, they rendered it using polygons, when a rotating playfield is less resource intensive, and would look better (light reflections, no texture distortion.) AM2 and sonic team are probably the best development houses out there, look at what they did on a multi processor machine like the saturn, and teh saturn does begin to  look a lot like an amiga. The battle of Saturn vs N64 & Playstation looks a bit like Amiga vs PC vs Mac of a a few years earlier, with similar outcomes. EA is a mostly shovelware company nowadays, I enjoy 2K studio games a lot better, as does my friend, a sports fan and casual gamer. (Cited The video game critic forums for saturn technical details)

[barney]

Very Interresting

[Jpan1]

Its seems to me a battle between marketing (making money) and the creative approach to making games  (to do something original and appealing) and EA in the early days did some original stuff for the Amiga with the likes of Populus and Syndicate, but they were push to create games which appealed to a wider marker, and then Sports and computers. Maybe this made them successful as a software company, but does little for there to create an image as a cutting edge games producer, where the ideas that sell, are the ones that make the most money. The Amiga one of the best creative platforms that they could develop there products on at the time and so there 'failures' were a part of that success according to the article. (so not really a failure  I really liked 'flood' this was a cool game!

[scuzzb494]

http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com/amiga/a500/a209_a50011.jpg

[amigacooke]

So they admit they screwed us? I bought all my C64 games, but pirated most of my Amiga games because of this exact attitude!

(they're one of many)

Pirating all the games. What a brilliant way to get publishers to support a platform.

[mdv2000]

Well, I think another thing people are missing was in the early days EA wasn't writing games - they where contracting out publishing houses of games and being distributors - not producers.  They may have had a few in house games, but the ones we remember where all 2nd party to them. Bullfrog actually wrote Populous - a game I still play today via GOG.com - http://www.gog.com/gamecard/populous.  Also Interplay was another developer they gobbled up.  When I shopped EA titles back then, I looked at the developers to determine if it was a game I cared to try.  Companies like EA and Activision realized around 95-96 that with growth and distribution capability of the internet that they either bring these developers/titles in-house or be cut out of the loop.  It is why so many developer companies are getting bought up and brought into the fold of these large publishers like EA.

EA also paid companies to port titles from Amiga to PC or vice-versa -that is why so many hardcore gamers won't touch ports because for their $50-$60 cash - a port isn't worth it.  

As for the Genesis titles - they did get better - but after 5 years of trial and error - it would make sense.  The Amiga was great at exposing poor programming and slack effort - because there are so many great games with awesome music and graphics that a lackluster effort stuck out like a sore thumb - which I do believe was the point the Rich was trying to make in the interview.

[gizz72]

Greetings,

Why not ask EA to create games and utilities again to NG Amigas like MOS, AOS, AROS and Classics. They not only help the Amiga community, they would help jumpstart the platform again. Who knows. I'd like to see NBA 2012 on AROS for a change.


Regards,
GiZz72

[odin]

Because hell would be frozen over and pigs would be flying. You seriously think there is money to be made from creating games for a market of a couple of hundred, perhaps a couple of thousand?