MADDEN MEMORIES: As founder and first CEO of Electronic Arts (EA) I created much of the early Madden Football game design. Without LLMs or AI, we relied entirely on programmatic decision-branches and probabilities. John Madden was essential in addressing my seemingly infinite array of questions. in #ceo #founder #videogames #retrogaming #ea #gamedesign #gamedevelopment
LEGEND ✓ Such an Iconic franchise, Trip Hawkins 🙌
Trip, when can I schedule you for the AWS Game Industry Legends interview series? :)
As I’ve posted before, still waiting for the Trip Hawkins Museum for the Foundation of Everything museum to open. It’s truly a gift to see these inside peeks. I remember getting the 3DO (and still waiting for the M2 lol), once visiting the sunny campus of EA back when I was electronics boutique in the 1990’s. Trip, thank you for your posts!!!!
I am a total sucker for old handwritten design docs. These belong in a museum! (Or at least pass them off to gamehistory.org/)
Year and year, I am stunned by the advancements in Madden. I will never forget the early days on the Sega Genesis, learning about playbooks and defensive schemes, why going for it on 4th and long is not smart, and who the best players in the National Football League were. The video game industry owes very much to the Madden series. I am actually in the Top 100 among online players in Madden 25!
This is really fascinating Trip, so glad you could share this, it should be in a museum somewhere
You wrote emails by hand in those days?
What on Earth?? This is a meticulously quantified and programmatic summary of a given video game's event probabilities and variables to say the least!
So wild to see Trip Hawkins … thanks for sharing! Definitely very different from the play calling logic Jeff Luhr and I were always having to try and refine in the 2000’s but you had some elegant stuff there!
Founder- 13th Bridge Games Studio, UCLA Anderson, Boston College II Ex-McKinsey, Johnson & Johnson
1wThis and Tommy Lasorda Baseball were the two games that made me a true gamer. Madden was revolutionary and I buy it every year to this day. It’s also one of the games that inspired me to leave my career in healthcare to make a sports game. Thank you for all the fun and inspiration!