Bing's Big Deals

Author

Troy Fields
April 19, 2022

Every industry has their all-stars and this week we'll look at a lesser known name that has had a massive impact on the industry.

Bing Gordon was one of the founding employees of Electronic Arts (makers of FIFA, MADDEN, Battlefield, Apex Legends and many more). He wasn't a programmer or an artist like many of the people that helped create the video games industry. He was a marketer with an MBA from Stanford.

Tim Hawkins founded EA in May 1982 and quickly hired Bing Gordon as a 1 man marketing team later that same year. He helped shape the early days of EA and the video games industry as a whole, and in 1998 was promoted to Chief Creative Officer of EA. Bing left EA in 2008 after nearly 26 years to join the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins as a General Partner (currently still there).

This video game executive hasn't been solely focused on gaming. He was also a founding director of Audible.com (acquired by Amazon in 2008 for $300M) and also served on Amazon's Board of Directors from 2003 to 2017. He was also an early investor of Zynga which IPO'd in 2011 and was just acquired by Take-Two Interactive for $12.7B.

Interestingly he was (probably) a big part of Amazon's push into gaming with the launch of Amazon Games Studios in 2012. While no longer on the Amazon Board of Directors, he still advises the company and AGS in particular.

Bing is a big deal, and not just in the video game industry.

He is 72 and still goes surfing every day near his residence in Woodside, CA.

I actually had the chance to be a viewer on a Zoom interview with Bing 2 months ago. His energy and candor were unparalleled (especially at 72). My biggest takeaways were that you don't have to be creative to work in a creative industry, and trust your instincts more than authority figures.

There are numerous interviews online you can watch like this one, and checkout this great twitter thread on lessons he’s learned throughout his career.

I'll wrap up this segment with 2 quotes from Bing that I found interesting:

  • "charism and animal energy" - on what you need as a business leader

  • “It took us a decade to realize Hollywood doesn’t own anything but suits.”

Job Board

Looking for a job in Gaming? Each week I spend a few hours looking through open roles at different studios and list anything interesting I see for readers.

This week’s theme is Electronic Arts. They currently have 1,166 open roles on their website. Here are a few interesting ones.

Product?

Creative?

Technical?

Game Design?

Business & Marketing?

Featured Game

This week’s featured game is TUNIC. A precious action-adventure game developed by Canadian indie developer Andrew Shouldice.

Initial release date: March 16, 2022

Thanks for Reading :)

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