Interview With Bing Gordon (EA)

djedery writes "I interviewed Bing Gordon (Chief Creative Officer of EA) via email. We discussed game design in academia, outsourcing, game scheduling / budgeting, games for India / China, getting along with marketing, and risks." Decent interview; could be longer but the line about reverse engineering the Genesis is an interesting one, especially considering that some of the current legislative attempts would make that illegal.

Genesis

[Threni]

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EA's biggest risk was preparing to launch a lineup of games for the Sega Genesis without a license. We reverse-engineered the electronics in a "clean room" environment, because Sega wouldn't give us licensee terms that we could live with. If this had not worked, and the games hadn't sold, (Sega agreed to license terms the evening before our public introduction of games), EA would probably have gone the way of early computer game leaders like Broderbund and Sierra. It was truly a "bet the company" decision.
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Codemasters (UK based company) did that too. Sega/Nintendo settled out of court, and the "secret" deal was to pretend they'd paid or something, otherwise the people who actually did pay would get pissed.

Re:Genesis

[Fred Or Alive]

No, Codemasters has always been a British company, and I think you're thinking of them (or at least their North American distributer) winning a lawsuit in Canada before they won the US one over the NES Game Genie. I seem to remember that Codemasters stuff was distributed in America by the makers of Micro Machines, and therefore Codemasters got the licence to make the Micro Machines games, which was also their first Mega Drive game, which led to the suit described by the grandparent.

Re:Interesting comment about reverse engineering.

[gEvil (beta)]

Not to mention that the clones were licensees of the MacOS and Apple hardware. Even had the DMCA existed, there wouldn't have been any violations to speak of.