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EA Stakes Out Turf at USC and Playa Vista - Neighborhood Doomed
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3112 Reads
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Okay, the headline's hyperbolic. But consider these facts:
Before our eyes, a new studio power is taking shape. The old giants - Universal, Fox, Paramount - and the relative newcomers - Miramax, Dreamworks, et al - are already sharing box office dollars and viewers' attention spans with video game studios. Soon, they'll also have to share political juice, educational influence and even the responsibility for traffic jams.
Electronic Arts Los Angeles - rebadged after Redwood-City-based EA bought out the lagging Dreamworks Interactive in 2000, has just begun moving into the flashy "Water's Edge" development in Playa Vista, at the corner of Jefferson and Lincoln Boulevards ...
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And late last month, the massively successful game maker ("Medal of Honor," "Madden NFL," "The Sims" etc. etc.) pumped $8 million into USC's School of Cinema-Television to fund the school's interactive media division and even endow a chair in interactive entertainment.
It makes good business sense for the EA. They'll need a pipeline for developing young, affordable, and moldable game-crafters: EA's planning to expand staff to 1,000 at Water's Edge, and the hunger for new product grows, unabated.
More bodies commuting to Water's Edge should add noticeably to the already brutal traffic load on Lincoln Boulevard brought on by the Playa Vista development, new housing complexes on Lincoln near Mindanao and Fiji Ways and ancillary effects of the net increase of SoCal's population by 1 million souls in the past three years.
Of course, the doomsday gridlock prediction assumes that all those 13,000 housing units will be fully occupied, too. Recent reports say that California job growth is slowing and firms are fleeing the state for cheaper climes, so maybe traffic wil just stay sluggish instead of slowing to a near standstill most of the time.
Obviously, EA's on a massive uptrend as the leader in a new media market that has come to rival the movie industry for the number of dollars it happily hoovers out of the nation's wallets. But you have to wonder - when the current Los Angeles real estate bubble finally bursts - whether EA's artists and programmers will be toiling in the middle of a ghost town of unsold luxury condos with rooftop barbecues.
And how long will it be before some wag in the EA creative department proposes a post-apocalyptic first-person shooter set in a deserted luxury housing development ...?
Oh, well, at least Steve Soboroff seems happy at the moment.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Sunday, April 11, 2004 - 11:59 PM
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