Ever wonder why Electronic Arts games on the Sega Mega Drive / Genesis came on different cartridges with those massive yellow tabs? It's because EA was brave enough to challenge Sega's licensing terms, but it was still a huge gamble – as the publisher's founder, Trip Hawkins, readily admits.
Speaking on The Retro Hour Podcast back in 2020, Hawkins reveals that the move, which elevated EA to a whole other level of power and helped Sega eat into Nintendo's lead in North America, was "the most courageous thing I ever did in my career."
"I've done plenty of stupid things that didn't work - well, this is one case where I did something smart that did work out," he adds. "I was looking at Nintendo and what I didn't like about it, and I noticed that Sega had decided they were gonna copy everything Nintendo was doing. And I thought, 'Y'know, I wanna investigate reverse-engineering the Sega Genesis so that we can basically bring products to market without a licence.' And this is the one and only time in the history of the game industry that any company has successfully pulled it off."
Hawkins reveals that a previous case involving Tengen and Nintendo disabused him from ever trying this with the creator of the NES (Tengen lost the case because it was proven to have infringed Nintendo's copyright by gaining access to its cartridge lock-out system from the US Copyright Office), but crucially, the Mega Drive / Genesis lacked a similar security chip setup at launch – which meant that EA could safely reverse-engineer the hardware without infringing on any of Sega's copyrights. "We had to gamble and say, 'All right, we're gonna reverse-engineer this thing, and we're gonna do it correctly.'"
EA snapped up one of the first Mega Drive consoles to go on sale in Japan at the close of 1988 and got to work. "It took us about a year to figure out how it worked, and then we were able to supply our developers with instructions on how to make Sega Genesis games and tools to help them do that. Then we were able to get several projects into production, and we were able to prepare to launch them in June of 1990 at the CES show."
It was around this point that Hawkins decided that it might be prudent to approach Sega:
"Towards the end of that process, I realised, 'Hey, Trip - you're CEO of a public company and you're about to basically go to war with Sega. Maybe it would be a good thing to just go talk to Sega and see if you can make peace with them.'
So I started that process about two months before the CES show, and they were initially trying to just huff and puff like the Big Bad Wolf and blow our house down and making all these threats, like, 'Well, were just gonna change the US machine so that your software doesn't work and we're gonna sue you and we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that.'
Well, calmer heads prevailed and we started a conversation process, and I was eventually able to convince them to give us a very, very generous licence agreement because I had enough leverage to not need it. And we pulled that off."
The rest, as they say, is history; EA supplied Sega with a flood of best-selling titles such as John Madden Football, FIFA, Desert Strike, Road Rash, PGA Tour Golf and more – all of which initially launched on the Mega Drive / Genesis before the SNES (if they came to the SNES at all). These games were instrumental in driving the adoption of the console in North America and Europe, putting Sega in the hitherto unknown position of actually being able to challenge Nintendo's stranglehold.
"That had a lot to do with our ability to deliver half of the good games that were made available for the Sega in the next couple of years to essentially end up with half the market, which was kind of unprecedented for a third-party company," concludes Hawkins.
