Biography | Andrew Wilson — He Joined EA in the Old Library Rooms at Australia Fair

The job that made him a games executive was not in California. It was a small Electronic Arts outpost inside a Gold Coast shopping centre.

In May 2000, Andrew Wilson joined EA's studio on Australia's Gold Coast. He was in his mid-twenties and coming off the wreck of the late-1990s internet boom in Sydney.

The studio was building rugby, cricket, V8 supercar, and surfing games for a local market. The engineers knew the code. They needed someone who actually played the sports.

A Gold Coast newspaper later placed one office in the old Southport library rooms at Australia Fair, with another on Smith Street. The municipal library did sit inside this mall until it moved, in 2002, to Garden and Lawson Streets.

Australia Fair still stands at 42 Marine Parade, Southport, facing the Broadwater. The visitor finds a working shopping centre, not a plaque.

The studio itself did not last. EA closed the Gold Coast operation in 2002 for lack of scale.

Wilson was kept on. He moved through Sydney, then Vancouver, then onto the FIFA franchise that later made his name inside the company.

Later company biographies and independent profiles agree on the month: May 2000. They agree on the work: sports titles that needed a sports person, not another programmer.

What they do not give is a street number for the Smith Street room, so this pin stays on the mall that still exists and that the local paper named.

Thirteen years after that hire, the same company made him chief executive on the Redwood Shores campus. The first EA chapter started here, in a mall that used to hold a library.

Photo: SM247, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. Australia Fair, Southport, uploaded 2007.