The Time I Dissed Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts

 

When I used to go to University of Lafayette, my main running buddy was Techno Nick. Nick was tall, and cool, and awkward, and wore bell-bottom jeans at all times. We used to get high, all day every day, and worked together in our little student IT jobs at the business college.

One day we came in and saw the other IT kids trying to run CAT-5 cable through the ceiling panels, because we were upgrading from coax Token Ring networking. It was probably our first day on the job.

They were running a single strand at a time, removing a ceiling tile, shoving it down a few tiles, replacing it, getting down, moving the ladder.

Nick and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

We took all eleven cables or whatever it was, tied them to something. Nick poked his head up through the ceiling, and threw the whole bundle down the length of the hallway to the other lab. Basically completing hours of work for them in a few seconds.

He came down, and the head of the COBA IT department was ecstatically grateful.

“We’re going to…” I began.

“Lunch?” she said. Knowing full well that I meant we were going to get high.

So Nick and I brainstormed on various projects that we never quite put into action. I was already swamped with what I was working on at the time.

One of plans was the GUI for an operating system. I do remember that we had come up with the idea of menus that floated the most used option to the top, something I saw in some products a few years later, including Windows. But the one we were most excited about was a color Vectrex.

The Vectrex was a 1981 vector monitor cartridge-based gaming system. Black and white lines, like Asteroids. It only had about 34 games ever released, and we wanted a machine that would play Tempest. Color, in other words.

Things happened, of course, and we didn’t get past the dreaming and planning stage. Only later did I find out a prototype color Vectrex existed, although I don’t think the one people found even fully works. Lately I discovered someone on Youtube who managed to add color to existing Vectrexes, which is very cool.

But several years later, I found myself at Louisiana Tech. I wanted a more challenging school environment.

The first thing I did, though, was take over the radio station, KLPI.

I got elected into an unpaid librarian position. Basically, I was given access to the archive of old albums and could dig through them at will. I think it was in a dorm building closed off because of asbestos.

Of course I used it as a band practice area.

It was me, a kid named John who played guitar, and a cute, mousey red-headed girl named Margaret. Margaret played bass and had a Lemmy-style Rickenbacker that was as big as she was.

I played drums and sang some of the songs, with John and Margaret swapping vocal duties for various other cover tracks.

Most memorably, I sang  the D.R.I. song “Yes, Ma’am”, John sang some metal drinking song from a band I can’t recall (John was an alcoholic), and Margaret sang “Stripped, Raped, and Strangled” by Cannibal Corpse. With lyrics rewritten to be about guys instead of girls. It was a great little band, and she was really something to see when performing it. We were pretty good as far as thrown-together college bands go.

I also got keys to the station and used it as my personal jukebox.

I had my little radio slot, something like 10am-Noon or something. But I wouldn’t follow a playlist, do any bumpers, announcements, song IDs, station IDs, anything. I just played cool songs. What we were *supposed* to do was play the songs they told us to play, and every hour or so we could play one or two of our own choices. Yeah, no.

But we also used to be able to go in whenever no one else had a slot, and just play whatever we wanted. At least I did, anyway. I would go in at night, put on something like El-P’s first album, and clean the entire station.

We also had a dildo of a station manager named Will.

We started butting heads over everything I did, but mostly because he was crazy concerned with the FCC. Now, the FCC ‘Safe Harbor’ regulation actually states that profanity, to a degree, is okay in the off-hours of the night. But Will wanted to be in radio proper and wouldn’t listen to anything like that. One night I was playing the Machines of Loving Grace “Concentration” album in full, and I got a call from an angry Will.

“Did they just say SLEEP WITH THE MOTHERFUCKING FISHES TONIGHT?”

I hung up on him. Got on the air. “Hey, whoever that old lady is who keeps calling and complaining, you can go to hell.”

This all becomes relevant later on.

Because I needed a project. I’ve found that it’s a very good idea to take on one big project every semester, if you can find one. You push yourself, you generate some good resume fodder, and sometimes, you accomplish cool things.

This was the Top Dawg Business Plan Writing Competition. Great. Because the top prize was something like $5,000.

You needed a team of students, so I signed my wife on. In reality, she was a placeholder. I was up against teams of, like, five Indian grad students. Me, the perpetual freshman.

The project was a game company called Crash and Burn. The product, initially, was a multi-system luggable emulator. Essentially me and Techno Nick’s color Vectrex brought to life. But, much better, because it had a rotating monitor that could display horizontally and vertically, and ran ROMs from every possible working system. Pretty simple to throw together, really.

I got deep into writing a 54-page business plan or whatever it was. Hired a graphic artist to make some beautiful mockup posters for the presentation. When it came time for the first round of the competition, my project was easily the most viable, interesting, and potentially profitable.

I scored well in that round, and looked poised to win. Better yet, we had another month or so to revise the project based on feedback, and represent for the final round of judging.

Then came time for the station manager and others to audit the DJs.

“Please,” they pleaded. “Just follow the playlist for an hour or two while we audit you. We have to write up a report.”

Hahahaha. No.

My set that morning was Rick Wakeman’s “Journey to the Centre of the Earth”, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells”, and the first side of Venom’s “At War With Satan”, instrumental version.

Rick Wakeman was the keyboard player for Yes, and the whole album is a rock opera of amazing caliber. Mostly instrumental, it tells the entire Jules Verne story, punctuated by insane prog rock driven by some of the best synthesizer playing of all time. It was sampled for an LL Cool J song to great effect, and you can hear how it influenced the Beastie Boys' jams on one of their later albums.

Tubular Bells is an album-long instrumental in which Oldfield plays something like 43 instruments, layering and building to a massive climax. It was the theme song to the movie The Exorcist. Ice-T opened his first full-length album with it.

Venom was early British proto-thrash metal. And, an album-side instrumental, but right before the big solo part, oops, singer Cronos says, “Fuck the bastards!”

Slipped my mind.

So, my set and the audit ended, and they were livid. Will wrote me up and tried to make me sign something. I flatly refused.

“If you kids are going to try and flex on me over rules, let’s also start enforcing laws.”

Because theft was rampant, and pretty much all of them were guilty. Massively guilty. Any new swag that came in was stolen. The best CDs were immediately stolen. The actual station library was fairly terrible, as a result.

“John, don’t you have about 200 stolen CDs at your apartment right now?”

This didn’t go over well with them. As a result, I lost my radio slot. But I still had the keys for the rest of the quarter, and continued to do sets whenever I wanted.

Not content to let it rest, I started shit with the Vice-President of Student Affairs over it. “When I win this business plan writing competition, I’m going to sue your ass.”

Foolhardy, in many ways, of course.

I was extremely fortunate to have some major league consultants on my project. Not to throw names around, but they included some game console and computer designers, major electrical engineers, and game coders. One became VP of a division of Sony Games, and eventually the Head of Google Games. Another had a successful little website where he sold legal game ROMs.

“This is a cool project, but if you’re serious about it, you need to abandon the idea of hardware altogether. It’s for the big boys only, because hardware is a loss-leader. You can only lose money on hardware and try to make it up on software. The numbers aren’t there, and you should switch to a software-only model.”

So, I sadly and wisely ditched the hardware component. I rewrote everything incorporating the new software model. And it was a killer.

Basically, you would buy a disc for the Playstation 2, Xbox, Gamecube, whatever, and it would include the emulators and a selection of arcade and console ROMs. Then you could use the online component to connect to a server and buy additional ROMs. It would monetize the pirate ROM market in the way that Apple did with MP3s.

As I was writing the revised business plan, Nintendo’s patent for just such a system was announced. I was definitely on the right track.

But when I passed the woman who ran the business plan writing competition in the student union one day, she was looking at me as if to say, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?” Because when it came time for the second, final presentation, two of the three judges had been replaced. The new guys had questions along the lines of “What’s a video game?” and “Why do you think video games would be profitable?”

Entirely playing dumb.

My greatly revised and improved, front-running business plan came in dead last, this time. Of four teams, I came in fourth. Even though their products and plans were pretty bad that year. The judge from the first round who stayed on was so upset at the railroading, he made them create an Honorable Mention category for me on the spot. He was visibly upset.

Not nearly as upset as my wife, who appeared in the school paper with a look on her face that could kill. A total and complete fuckjob.

But, oh, well.

Trip Hawkins had left Electronic Arts, and was looking to start a new company, with the terrible name Digital Chocolate. So I pitched it to him.

“It’s interesting,” he told me. “But I see too many problems with it, so I’m going to pass.”

The very business model that later became employed with great success  by Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft. Another startup, Gametap, I believe, did something similar as well.

Several years later, I dug up the original email from when I had contacted Hawkins.

“It’s tough,” I wrote him back, “being a mammal among the dinosaurs…”

Bonus LOL: He ended up leaving that company, too. But not before predicting the death of the console market in 2012.

Silly dinosaur.