Trip Hawkins: preference

Transcript context

…Nintendo didn't view, maybe even their own first-parties, but even that, they didn't view game developers as artists. That's right. In fact, they do that about Miyamoto-san. They had their own brilliant people that have, in fact, always made great first-party games. They were happy to let some third-parties tag along as long as they got overpaid by them for permission. It never really worked out all that well for anybody to be a third-party Nintendo licensee. That's why pretty much forever, for Nintendo's platforms, it's always more about the first-party games that Nintendo's make. But I was really worried that there was a hardware problem between the business model of Nintendo and the lack of multimedia features, and so I'm already thinking about that. I was already a really big fan of the Motorola MC68000 processor because Steve and I had picked it for Apple's next-gen machines. Anyway, when we started EA, the first development systems we bought were SUN workstations with that processor. Then coin-op machines started using that processor, and we licensed games like Marble Madness from Atari Coin-Op, and we were able to port it to the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST, which also came out in the mid-80s with that processor. We were very familiar with that processor. We find out that the SEGA which had been limited to only 1% market share of 8-bit consoles because Nintendo dominates it [...]. They were going to come to first, with the first 16-bit console using that processor with the sound chip, with the graphics chip and a price under $200. I thought “Well, we’ve built a tremendous arsenal of 16-bit technology, tools and game brands, and they just don’t line up with the right platform. This could be that platform.” This is the iPhone moment, right? For the market.…

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