Westwood/EA Pacific
Electronic Arts Pacific (EA Pacific or EAP) is a former American video game development studio best known for its work on the Command & Conquer real-time strategy franchise. Based in Irvine, California, near John Wayne Airport, the studio has its origins in a team formed in the late 1990s.
In 1998, following Electronic Arts’ acquisition of Westwood Studios, a new entity called Westwood Studios Pacific was established in California. This team worked closely with Westwood whilst gradually specialising in the development of strategy games for the PC.
In particular, the studio contributed to the development of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, released in 2000. The game was a huge success and became one of the most popular instalments in the franchise. The team continued its work on the game with Yuri's Revenge, its expansion pack released in 2001, which introduced a third faction led by Yuri, as well as new units and campaigns.
The studio was officially renamed EA Pacific in November 2001, thereby becoming a division directly integrated into Electronic Arts. Some of its members already had solid experience in the field of strategy games thanks to previous projects carried out under the Westwood banner.
The team’s history is also linked to Nox, an action role-playing game released in 2000, which stood out from the strategy titles usually associated with the studio. But it was primarily through the Command & Conquer series that EA Pacific built its reputation.
Its next major project was Command & Conquer: Generals, released on PC in February 2003. Unlike previous instalments, Generals moves away from the Red Alert and Tiberian Dawn universes to present a fictional contemporary conflict pitting the United States, China and the Global Liberation Army against one another. The game also introduced the SAGE graphics engine, which was subsequently used and refined for several Electronic Arts strategy games.
However, EA Pacific’s existence under this name was particularly short-lived. In March 2003, just a few weeks after the release of Command & Conquer: Generals, Electronic Arts closed the studio as part of a major reorganisation of its development teams.
Some of the employees then joined Electronic Arts Los Angeles (EALA), which took over the development of Electronic Arts’ strategy games. In particular, the team continued work on Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour, before going on to develop The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth and then new instalments of Command & Conquer. EA Pacific thus forms an important link between the Westwood Studios era and that of Electronic Arts Los Angeles in the franchise’s history.
