Biography | Andrew Wilson — The Board Made Him CEO on This Redwood Shores Campus

People remember Electronic Arts for its games. Fewer remember that the company handed the whole firm to a studio man on a Tuesday in September 2013.

On 15 September 2013 the board of Electronic Arts appointed Andrew Wilson, then 39, as chief executive and as a director.

The appointment took effect two days later, on 17 September, at the company's principal office: 209 Redwood Shores Parkway, Redwood City, California.

That address is on the public record in the Form 8-K EA filed the same day.

Wilson was not an outside turnaround hire. He had been inside the company since May 2000.

He had run EA Sports as executive vice president since August 2011, after earlier turns as senior vice president of EA Sports, of Global Online, and as a vice president on the sports label.

The man he replaced, John Riccitiello, had left in March. Executive chairman Larry Probst had been holding the job in the interim.

Probst told staff that Wilson was the first studio executive to serve as EA's chief executive.

The offer letter dated 15 September set a base salary of 800,000 dollars a year and put Wilson on the board from day one.

The campus still sits on the lagoon side of Redwood Shores. Visitors find a corporate park, not a studio lot.

What happened here was a title change with a filing number attached, not a ribbon-cutting.

Wilson had started thirteen years earlier at a small EA outpost on Australia's Gold Coast that made rugby, cricket, V8, and surfing games and then shut in 2002.

From that closed studio he moved through Asia and Europe and onto the FIFA franchise before the board, in this building, gave him the company.

The 8-K is still the cleanest source for the day. Age 39. Effective 17 September 2013. Address printed in the header.

Photo: King of Hearts, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Campus photograph, May 2011.