Wtf happened to EA of the past?

What happened to the company that gave us all these classics:

Faery Tale Adventure
Archon
Desert/Jungle/Soviet Strike
Road Rash
Mutant League Football
Starflight
Arctic Fox

How did they turn from that into the boring Madden/shitty movie license game company they are today?

Money.
And Starflight is just a computer port, not by EA.
The only thing that surprises me is they haven't brought Mutant League and Road Rash back with the newer systems, the rest of their moves are all about money, and these are gauranteed sellers. Sports + blood.
I've no clue why the Strike series stopped, after Future Cop LAPD (originally Future Strike) they dropped all their action gaming divisions save for whoever is doing the Bond games. It was less fun without the point system anyway, nothing like seeing a programming error that gives you points for nuking the IRS building or having to destroy civilian buildings to find a quickladder.

EA has always focused on outspending their competition with bigger titles and more marketing than anyone else. Where they made the change to evil, though, I think, was sometime shortly after Larry Probst took over Trip Hawkins' leadership position(this was in the late 80s) and they started to do in-house development. This wouldn't be so bad, except that as technology advanced they kept pushing for the consistent hit titles and to make this process more efficient they stopped taking risks, just like the rest of the industry.

The reason why I put Larry Probst at fault here is because he's the one focused on the bottom line. Trip isn't, not as much. He founded the company, but he also founded 3do and they're long gone, even though they were publishing good titles right until the end.

Its the way that companies are heading to nowadays. The bottom line is what matters to them and to make the guranteed (and probably biggest) profit is to keep cost down, take less risk and use tried-and-tested formulas.

EA are a cancer on the industry. They're what's wrong with games.

Origin
Westwood
Maxis
Bullfrog
DreamWorks Interactive

EA has an army of mindless nerd programmers and no moral ethics.
EA is to video games like Microsoft is to the world.

Linux fags can STFU then GTFO.

lol there was a time when EA was good?

I remember when I was a kid, and I didn't pay much attention to which companies made which games. This was in the late 1980s, when I gamed on a 286 and my NES. Then one day I started to make a connection. EA and Activision make ass games. This has not changed in over two decades.