EA Sports

EA Sports is a brand name used by Electronic Arts since 1993 to distribute games based on sports. Formerly a gimmick inside Electronic Arts sports games, that tried to mimic real-life sports networks, calling themselves "EA Sports Network" (EASN) with pictures or endorsements of real comentators such as Ron Barr and John Madden, soon grew up to become a sub-label on its own, releasing games such as FIFA, NHL, Madden NFL, and NCAA Football. EA Sports' early motto, If it's in the game, it's in the game reflects the aim of the early games to portrait reality as best as the technology would allow.

16 bit era

After establishing with some highly regarded titles from 1987-1992, most notably Earl Weaver Baseball 1987, John Madden Football 1990 and NHL Hockey 1991, EA decided in 1992 to launch a sports-only label and EASN was born. ESPN took note of the similarities, and forced EA to come up with a new label to put their sports label under for the 1994 season. The first run of the 1994 season still donned the EASN brand, with a 'first run' logo on the lower right hand corner of the box (this was also done in 1993), while the rest of the production run was under the name EA Sports. With a new logo (whose design later would be also adopted by EA) and a uniform box design, all white with a live-action photo (example), the exception being the Madden games, which featured Madden himself. All boxes would remain this way until 1997, when individual players starred alone, and although the 99 titles featured one unusual dark blue case, the all-white boxes returned next year.

Related Topics:
Earl Weaver Baseball - 1987 - 1990 - 1991 - 1992 - Example - 1997

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The first titles were released for both Sega's 16-bit console, the Mega Drive/Sega Genesis, and Nintendo's SNES (among other platforms, but only regularly for these two). In fact, some attribute the success of Sega's console partly on the strength of the sports catalog provided by EA Sports. On the other hand, the lack of them on the next Sega console, the Saturn is believed to be one of the reasons it failed on the American market.

Related Topics:
Sega - Mega Drive - Sega Genesis - Nintendo - SNES - Saturn

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