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There was a naive quality in 1982 around technology and the start of video games. And that's like the start of electronic music - there was this statement and, ideologically, these things to fight for.

In the early days of the video game business, everybody played. The question is, what happened? My theory - and I think it's pretty well borne out - is that in the '80s, games got gory, and that lost the women. And then they got complex, and that lost the casual gamer.

When we started EA in 1982, our goal was to make games as big a media as visual entertainment or movies. That was how big we dreamed at the time.

The same sort of thing was supposed to happen when performance animation was invented: Everybody thought it would save so much time. But it became its own niche altogether.

Everything's changed. The technology is the big thing changing now, the way movies like 'Alice' or 'Avatar' are made. And technology on the other side, the audience side. Word spreads so fast now on a movie, with the Internet, and piracy is something coming down the line like in the music industry.

The 1980s was a time of the great recession of interactive entertainment. When Atari fell in 1982, until Nintendo launched its console, video games were an outcast for five years.

In the first years after the systemic transition, our screens showed American entertainment that had not been available before, or had been available only sporadically.

Consumers are freeing up an enormous amount of time that they were spending with stereotypical old media, and clearly, that time is going primarily two places: videogames and online.

If pushed, though, I'd say that the next stage will be reached when it it's no longer true that about 75% of the best games were written in 1980's on the way to that.