We see farther

William Murray Hawkins III, nicknamed "Trip," grew up in an unconventional environment, a lively and quirky mix of scientific culture and artistic passion. His father, who had a degree in physics and later worked in marketing and sales of early electronic devices, had hobbies that included wood sculpture, oil painting, and gardening. His mother was a multi-instrumentalist musician and also a choir singer who wrote poetry in her free time and, like her husband, painted.

Born on December 28, 1953, in Pasadena, Hawkins from an early age tried to follow in his parents' footsteps. Every year, his mother participated in the local Halloween contest with elaborate costumes, often winning. The local appreciation for his mother's work reaffirmed to young Hawkins the connection between originality, creativity, and success, motivating him to follow suit: at the age of six, he emerged victorious in his first art contest and garnered coverage in a local newspaper.

Thanks to his father's job, Hawkins soon encountered the other major passion of his life: computers. A family friend, who was a successful engineer, owned an expensive PDP-8. It was 1971, Trip was almost 18, and when he saw the computer, he was particularly struck by its shape, the colorful lights, the rows of buttons, and especially by the small game that the owner had programmed in assembly to show off to his friends.

Passionate about football and an avid player of strategy games, particularly Strat-O-Matic, Hawkins created a football simulation game a couple of years later. In this game, the player managed a football team, making all the necessary decisions to run it and lead it to victory. In designing the game, Hawkins focused on creating the kind of game he would want to play. He borrowed $5,000 from his father and printed a few hundred copies, hoping to make enough money to continue his venture. Unfortunately, he hadn't accounted for the tastes of other players, who often found the long calculations needed to determine the outcome of decisions and progress the game tedious.

The commercial failure provided Hawkins with an opportunity to reflect on his first encounter with a computer and realize that a game like his would be much more appealing if freed from the complex and lengthy calculations that had made it a niche product. At the time, computers were still extremely expensive and difficult to use, so Hawkins predicted that technology and the market would take a few more years—seven, he estimated precisely—before reaching the critical level that would allow him to realize his idea of creating complex games using future computers.

In the following years, Hawkins studied at Harvard and graduated with a degree in Game Theory. In 1977, he joined Apple, which was still just a small California startup with a few dozen employees and revenue in the range of a million dollars. For Hawkins, employee number 68, it was a unique opportunity to witness the ongoing revolution from a privileged perspective: Apple, despite its still modest sales figures, was marketing one of the products that were laying the groundwork for the market he needed to realize the idea he had conceived years earlier.

However, at Apple, there was no interest in games. The company primarily focused on producing hardware, with no initiative in software development beyond producing a few educational books that served as introductions to programming or distributing program listings to customers, enabling even those with limited skills to use or study software. Even though the Copyright Act of 1976, effective from the beginning of 1978, had already introduced software copyright, the public was not yet culturally ready to accept the idea of buying hardware and then software.

Hawkins: "The first time [Apple] went to the CES show, we didn't have anything to show other than a really crippled little Asteroids-type game with the 'Star Wars' name on it. It was hilarious because, in those days, people just rampantly trampled both copyright and trademark laws. And really, that was what we were doing to show off the machine. A guy from 20th Century Fox came up to me, gave me a business card, and said, 'Yeah, you're going to have to stop doing that.'"

The hardware was still in its infancy for the consumer market, and one of Hawkins' responsibilities was to study strategies to increase Apple's sales and make its computers more appealing to a broader audience, beyond just hobbyists. One of Hawkins' primary objectives was to create products that would interest business users. During his four years at Apple, his efforts culminated in the development and launch of the Macintosh, particularly advocating for the adoption of the mouse as an input device, a move Hawkins supported wholeheartedly.

Sensing that the market was nearing readiness for the idea he had been nurturing for a decade, Hawkins resigned from Apple in January 1982. Thanks to the successful IPO in 1980, the support from the founders, and his position, he had earned enough stock options in just four years to retire, though that was not his goal. Moreover, he had built a robust network of professional contacts that would prove invaluable. Notably, Hawkins had met Don Valentine, the venture capitalist who played a key role in the creation of both Atari and Apple, and he had secured his backing for his video game publishing project.

After resigning from Apple, Hawkins incorporated his company as Amazin' Software, invested $200,000, and began working from home to develop a business plan and prepare to launch. After a couple of months, he moved to the offices of Sequoia Capital, Valentine's investment firm, which provided additional capital. Hawkins then began recruiting the staff he needed to operate. Heeding the advice of the venture capitalist, who told him to stay at Sequoia's offices until his employees outnumbered Sequoia's, Hawkins started by recruiting former colleagues and expanded to include people from other companies he had collaborated with: he convinced Joe Ybarra to leave Apple, Timothy J. Mott from Xerox, and Bing Gordon from the well-known advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather in New York.

By the end of 1982, Hawkins had built a team of about a dozen people, chosen for their skills and experience, as collaborators or partners, and was ready for the big leap: leaving Sequoia's offices and preparing to launch a new series of games within the following year. The company, which had since changed its name to Electronic Arts, had no programmers or development studios at that time. The initial plan was to recruit exceptional developers, chosen for their unique ability to create challenging, complex, graphically impressive, and sonically captivating games—Digital Artists, showcased like the superstars of Activision, but with some important differences. While Activision's in-house, highly talented developers worked with outdated platforms to create fun games, Hawkins envisioned more for his company: challenging, technically advanced games for new, powerful platforms, and aesthetically pleasing software that was emotionally engaging and even capable of "making players cry."

Hawkins' vision was far more radical than that of Levy. Activision had merely emphasized its programmers more prominently, creating original games instead of arcade ports, but in many other ways, its operations followed Atari's footsteps, even in the design of game boxes, where the author's name was present but placed on the back. Hawkins wanted to take this a step further, creating products that resembled record albums as much as possible, with artistic and sophisticated covers and the developer's name prominently displayed in large letters above the game's title.

Additionally, all other software companies and publishers had utilized common distribution channels, with Softsel being the most significant. Softsel was founded through commercial contacts Ken Williams made while seeking a buyer for Mystery House. Drawing from his experience at Apple, Hawkins wanted to do things differently and create his own distribution network, allowing him greater control over sales channels and avoiding the need to share profits with others.