Between that whole “making people work till they die” thing, muscling the competition out of football games, and breaking up THE BAND, man, Electronic Arts went from scrappy underdog to the Evil Empire of the games industry quicker than Trip Hawkins could say “3DO.”
While it’s done little to stop the cash register parade each fall during National Madden Day, EA gets a pretty bad rap among the hardest of hardcore gamers. I can understand rooting for the underdog – I mean, I’ve followed the Detroit Tigers for more than twenty years – but I can’t entirely get behind the “EA sucks” sentiment that seems to crop up in the comments of every industry blog as soon as they announce a new title.
Yes, EA tends to go overboard with franchises (see my earlier Skate post), and their need to meddle with a good, established game each and every year has produced some real head-scratchers, like that year they added “realistic” pressure-induced jitters to Tiger Woods PGA Tour. However, you can almost always count on a solid third-party launch title from EA whenever a new system comes out, and the mass market appeal of games like Madden, NCAA Football and Fight Night has pumped up the installed base of every successful system since the Genesis, and helped the entire industry find and maintain a very specific, vital audience.
Love them or hate them, it’s hard to find fault with today’s announcement out of EA: they’re allowing SimCity to be bundled with every single computer sold in the “One Laptop per Child” initiative (initially referred to as “the 100-dollar laptop project”). So kids that receive those funky little green-and-white laptop, from Argentina to Uruguay, will get the seminal Will Wright experience packed in.
Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You contains a great little passage about the higher-level thinking that SimCity effortlessly teaches, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that hasn’t played it in one form or another, at least for a little bit. It’s like Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego in that respect – widely available on a ton of platforms over the years, and a staple in junior high school computer labs.
I personally sank my teeth into the superb Super Nintendo port from a pre-EA Maxis almost 15 years ago. The portable, stripped-down version of SimCity 2000 EA recently put out is making me REALLY want a DS Lite today. The fundamental ideas behind SimCity dovetail nicely with the ambitions of the One Laptop per Child project, and these kids will certainly get more out of the game than they would have if Minesweeper or Solitaire were included. Bravo.
