Association With Electronic Arts
Soon Freeman made a contact that would prove pivotal for both Free Fall and the fledgling computer game publisher, Electronic Arts (EA). The same day he incorporated his company, Trip Hawkins contacted Freeman. Freeman was attracted by EA's generous attitude and the welcome windfall of development cash. Soon, Free Fall signed EA's first two development contracts. For their first title, inspired by sword-and-sorcery themes and the holographic chess-like game featured in Star Wars, they set to work on Archon. Originally developed as a two-player only game, EA requested a one-player mode as well. Though it only had a passing resemblance to chess, Archon featured innovative gameplay and theme. Freeman and Reiche developed the game design and Westfall focussed on the programming. Freeman and Reiche also developed the artwork for this first version for the Atari home systems.
Upon its release in 1984, Archon was an enormous hit and EA asked for a sequel. Archon is still regarded as a seminal game in the history of computer games.
FreeFall immediately set out to create the sequel, but significantly altered the gameplay, strategies and premise of the game, adding a new gameboard, new spells, new creatures and abilities to the mix. Archon II: Adept was also released in 1984 and received even more acclaim than the original.
Both these games were lucrative for both Free Fall and EA and were key to EA's success as a fledgling publisher. Through the years, as more systems came on the market, such as the Amiga and the Atari ST, FreeFall ported these games to those systems. The games were hits on all systems for which they were released.
Free Fall also developed a murder mystery game concurrently with the first Archon. Murder on the Zinderneuf (MotZ), with Robert Leyland, was innovative in that it generated a new plot each time it was played. Freeman says he was inspired by his favorite board game Clue. MotZ debuted a few weeks after Archon, but was eclipsed by Archon's enormous success.
Read more about this topic: Free Fall Associates
Famous quotes containing the words association with, association, electronic and/or arts:
“Association with other people corrupts our character Mespecially when we have none.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.”
—French National Assembly. Declaration of the Rights of Man (drafted and discussed August 1789, published September 1791)
“The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.”
—Joyce Cary (1888–1957)