It's 8am on January 17, 2002, and everyone inside the Stage Left conference room at Electronic Arts is awakened by a small superhero mouse in a red cape. "Here I come to save the day!" emanates from the speakers. Andy Kaufman is nowhere to be found, but instead, the Mighty Mouse theme is playing for the 15 top-level executives at EA, including CEO Larry Probst. Within seconds, everyone starts looking at each other, as if to say, "I didn't get that memo. Who authorized this Mighty Mouse game?"
Mark Skaggs fondly recalls how he played the Mighty Mouse theme for the EA Executives.
In reality, no such game exists. Rather, an anxious developer is simply looking to set the stage for his demo. Standing at the front of the room, Mark Skaggs, a former Texas Instruments engineer who had moonlighted as a keyboard player in a Dallas funk band, is the man responsible for playing the theme song at such an early hour. "We were up until 1am last night trying to set up. We had less than six hours' sleep," he later explains. "So we were a little punchy and thought Mighty Mouse would wake everyone up before our demo."
Mark Skaggs and Harvard Bonin prepare to demonstrate their team's new game.
The demo in question is the latest creation from Skaggs and his 40-person team back in Irvine, California. Previously, his team created Red Alert 2 and its expansion pack, Yuri's Revenge, two real-time-strategy titles that reinvigorated Westwood's seminal Command & Conquer series. Today, along with producer Harvard Bonin, Skaggs has traveled to EA's corporate headquarters in Redwood City, California, for a judgment day of sorts--the day when the worldwide executive staff at Electronic Arts gets its first glimpse of the next Command & Conquer.
"We're not going to tell you a lot, we're just going to show you the biggest C&C ever." -Mark Skaggs, speaking to the top 15 executives at Electronic Arts
When the theme song finishes playing, Skaggs signals Bonin to start a videotape. "We're not going to tell you a lot," he says, pausing for a second to let his words sink in. "We're just going to show you the biggest C&C ever." But for these jaded executives, empty promises are par for the course. "I could see it all on their faces," Skaggs later remembers. "They were all saying, 'Yeah right, you go right ahead and show us the biggest C&C ever.'"
Then, the video starts. "1995," zooms onto the screen in gold lettering. It fades out and the words "Command & Conquer" appear. Then, after five seconds of gameplay footage, "2000" comes onto the screen, followed by images of Red Alert 2. Finally, "2002" appears. Everything goes black. The executives wait with nervous anticipation for what is next.
