Distinctive Software

~ the eulogy ~

Distinctive Software did not close. It got a new sign on the same building in Burnaby, kept most of its people, and carried on making driving games for the company that bought it. That is still a death, because the thing that was distinctive about Distinctive Software was that nobody in California owned it.

Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember were teenagers in British Columbia when they wrote a game called Evolution and took it to Sydney Development Corporation, which published it in 1982. Mattrick was seventeen. They set up their own studio the same year and spent the rest of the decade as a contract developer, which in the eighties meant your name went on the box in small type under somebody else's logo.

The catalog is almost entirely things that move fast. Test Drive in 1987 for Accolade put you inside the dashboard of a car you could not afford and pointed it up a mountain road with a police cruiser somewhere behind you. The Duel: Test Drive II followed in 1989. Grand Prix Circuit and The Cycles came out of the same pipeline, and Stunts in 1990 handed players a track editor and a loop and let them find out what a Countach does when it leaves the road at speed. There was a boxing game and a baseball game in there too. The studio moved between publishers depending on who was paying, Accolade most often.

1991 is seven years before I had a modem. In Turkey the games outlived the company by a long way, because DOS games traveled on copied floppies and a copied floppy carries no corporate history with it. Whoever was running Stunts in Ankara in 1994 was running a Distinctive Software product and had no reason to know it. By the time I got online the name had been gone for most of a decade and the building was called EA Canada.

~ the dossier ~

~ what they were good at ~

Driving on hardware that had no business rendering a road. Distinctive's engines ran on 8 and 16 bit machines where every frame had to be argued for, and the answer was usually to strip the world down to what the car needed and spend the rest of the budget on the road surface. Test Drive is remembered for its interior view, and that view is also what hid how little was outside the windshield.

Stunts is the one that lasted longest as software. It shipped with an editor, so the content problem solved itself, and people kept building tracks for it into the two thousands on machines that had no other reason to still run DOS. A game that outlives its publisher by fifteen years is doing something the publisher never paid for.

~ the deal ~

Electronic Arts in 1991 was a publisher of roughly two hundred people with distribution and almost no internal development capacity. Buying Distinctive got it a working studio of proven people in a single transaction, for something in the region of ten to eleven million dollars in cash and stock. The studio became EA Canada and the sports catalog moved in behind it.

Mattrick did not leave. He ran EA's worldwide studios for years, then went to Microsoft to run the Xbox business. Zynga made him chief executive after that. The seventeen year old who sold a game to a Vancouver publisher in 1982 spent the next thirty years inside the industry that grew up around him.

~ what the building became ~

EA Canada is still in Burnaby at somewhere around thirteen hundred people, and it carries the name EA Vancouver now. It has been the home of the NHL games since 1991 and of FIFA since 1993, which means the same site has shipped an annual sports title every year for longer than a lot of its current staff have been alive.

That is what makes this an odd grave. Nothing was destroyed except the name and the ownership. But a studio that answers to a publisher is a different object from a studio that sells to one, and the company that existed between 1982 and 1991 was the second kind. It ended the day the check cleared.

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