EA Los Angeles began life as DreamWorks Interactive, founded on March 22, 1995 by Alan Hartman, Glenn Entis and John A. S. Skeel as a 50/50 joint venture between DreamWorks SKG and Microsoft. Each partner invested $30 million, and the team was split between Los Angeles and Redmond, Washington. The studio's defining moment came in 1999 with Medal of Honor, a World War II shooter conceived by Steven Spielberg that approached the war with a gravity few console games had tried, and that began a series that paved the way for the military shooters that followed. Electronic Arts acquired the studio on February 24, 2000, for a reported $10 million, and renamed it EA Los Angeles. Its first release under the new name, Medal of Honor: Underground, continued the series it had created. On August 6, 2003, the studio moved from Bel Air to Playa Vista. That same year it merged with EA Pacific and took in staff from the recently closed Westwood Studios, the team that created Command & Conquer. The series came to EA Los Angeles along with those developers.
From 2003 to 2010, EA Los Angeles was the home of Command & Conquer and carried the real-time strategy series forward with releases including Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3. The Tiberium saga ended with Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight in March 2010. It brought Kane's long war between the Global Defense Initiative and the Brotherhood of Nod to a close and replaced traditional base building with the Crawler, a mobile base that changed how the series played. In July 2010 the studio was rebranded Danger Close Games to lead the Medal of Honor reboot released that year, and it followed with Medal of Honor: Warfighter in October 2012. After Warfighter's poor reception, EA put the Medal of Honor series out of rotation and closed the studio on January 30, 2013. Its senior staff formed the core of DICE LA in May 2013, and that team later became Ripple Effect Studios, an EA studio in Los Angeles that works on Battlefield. For strategy players, the studio's legacy is the final chapter of the Tiberium story, and Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is available here for PC through the EA app.
