EA Vancouver is Electronic Arts's largest and oldest studio. It employs roughly 1,300 people in Burnaby, British Columbia, and its roots go back to January 1983, when it opened as Distinctive Software. Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember founded the company on the success of Evolution, a game Mattrick made at 17 that Sydney Development Corporation published in 1982. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Distinctive made its name with racing and sports games released under the Accolade brand, including the Test Drive series, Stunts, 4D Boxing and Hardball II. That partnership also led to one of the era's notable legal fights. In 1989, Distinctive programmers working as Unlimited Software, Inc. converted Sega's arcade racer Out Run for MS-DOS. Accolade sued and lost: the court ruled that the Test Drive II licensing agreement had transferred the game's concept and design, not its underlying source code.
Electronic Arts bought Distinctive Software in 1991, in a deal reported at roughly $10 to $11 million, and renamed it EA Canada. The studio, which also went by EA Burnaby before taking the EA Vancouver name, became the center of EA Sports development, and its catalog traces much of modern sports gaming. It includes the FIFA series, which continues today as EA Sports FC, along with NHL, EA Sports UFC, and the NBA Live and NCAA Basketball titles made between 1994 and 2009. It also includes the arcade-style EA Sports BIG lineup of SSX, NBA Street, NFL Street and FIFA Street. The studio kept growing through the 2000s. It took on half the jobs from EA Seattle when that studio closed in 2002. That same year, EA bought Black Box Games, which became EA Black Box inside EA Canada. EA Black Box is known for Need for Speed and Skate, and it ran as an independent studio from 2005 until it closed in 2013. In 2011, the studio bought freemium developer Bight Games. Today the Burnaby campus has a motion-capture studio, audio composition rooms, video editing suites and the world's largest video game test operation. If you have ever played a season of NHL or built a squad in EA Sports FC, much of that experience was built here.
