By John Ruch
Photo: Larry Probst speaks, with Mayor Martin Walsh looking on, at the Olympics bid selection announcement in Boston on Jan. 9. (Photo by Boston Mayor's Office)
In its latest attempt to ram the 2024 Olympics down Boston’s gagging throat, the nonprofit-in-name-only bidding cabal Boston 2024 recently announced a new board highlighted by sports heroes Larry Bird and David Ortiz. But another big addition to the board gives Boston 2024 a direct connection to another famed, yet far less appealing, legacy: one of the world’s most hated video-game companies.
New Boston 2024 member Larry Probst is not only chair of the U.S. Olympic Committee. He’s also board chairman at Electronic Arts, a video-game maker known for parasitical corporate takeovers, invasive security measures, bullying methods of copyright enforcement, financial exploitation of athletes, and customer service that treats its public like an enemy. Which is to say, he’s a perfect fit with the Olympics, which is infamous for all of the above and worse.
A former Clorox executive and current overseer of a gift-card empire, Probst brings those same sensibilities to the worlds of sports and arts. On his watch, the USOC is known for being blundering, ham-fisted, and overly corporate and greedy even by the International Olympic Committee’s deranged standards, leading to internal frictions and humiliating U.S. Olympic bid failures.
Ditto for Electronic Arts, which has repeatedly infuriated and ripped off fans of its games during Probst’s service there in various leadership positions. Buying out companies to crank out shoddy sequels to their beloved games. Overbearing and spyware-ish digital rights management software. Contemptuous dismissal of public complaints. With those methods and behaviors, EA earned such nicknames as “Evil Empire.” Angry gamers famously got EA declared the “Worst Company in America” in The Consumerist’s annual poll two years in a row (2012 and 2013), beating out the likes of Bank of America and Walmart.
Just as the Olympics champions “amateur” athletics while pulling in billions of corporate-sponsorship and TV-rights dollars for itself, EA has been an athlete-exploiter. In 2013, EA settled a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against its use of the likenesses of college football and basketball players in its sports video games without permission or compensation, as ESPN reported.
In the sort of truth more insane than fiction, an Olympics bid organization that treats Boston like its private game of SimCity now includes the guy whose company actually makes SimCity. EA only bought out SimCity, and naturally managed to screw it up with a disastrous and invasive security regime—much like a real Olympics does to a real city. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Finland, which has fought off recent Olympics bids, also has produced a well-liked competitor to SimCity.)
Much like the Olympics, EA has apologized for its sleaze and scams and bullying, then pretty much gone on doing the same business as usual. I got a personal taste of this last fall, when I bought the acclaimed game Dragon Age: Inquisition, published by EA. Playing the game requires use of EA’s DRM software Origin, loathed for privacy violations and technical failures. Origin immediately broke, and since EA has deliberately done away with direct customer service contacts, getting help was a ludicrous chore. Finally accessing the game, I found it bug-riddled. After waiting a few weeks for bug-fixes, I tried again—to find Origin broken again. I haven’t summoned the willpower for another day-long help-war. Thus, EA has my money, and I have nothing, in the name of entertainment—a similar financial situation to most taxpayers in Olympic host cities.
The EA-Boston 2024 connection is not merely personal. In a link reported by few and understood by none, Boston and other would-be host cities made their first bid pitches to the USOC in December at EA’s world headquarters.
Boston’s bid and pitch were shrouded in secrecy and remain so. At that time, the public knew only that Boston 2024 had secretly crafted a bid—its venues pegged without public notice or input—and Mayor Marty Walsh had unilaterally signed on. Most local news stories said only that Walsh and Boston 2024 were making the pitch in “California,” a weirdly vague dateline.
Then I came across a photo of the Boston crew outside the bid location, and was surprised to see EA’s logo on the windows. I realized the pitches were being made at EA’s Redwood City HQ, and only by looking up EA’s executives did I learn the Probst-EA-Olympics connection.
The artistic side of me was intrigued by this relationship between the worlds of gaming and the Games. For a now-scrapped freelance piece, I reached out to EA for comment shortly after the Olympics bid-pitch meeting. Is EA, for example, considering making a new line of Olympics video games, or organizing Olympics-style eSports competitions? (Incidentally, the latter is starting to happen, at least at the international level.)
An EA spokeswoman shut me down.
“Larry Probst’s role on the USOC and the Electronic Arts board are completely separate and there is no relationship between the two organizations in the way you describe,” she said in an email. “EA employees aren’t exposed to or involved in any activities of the U.S. Olympic Committee and vice versa. We also can’t comment on the non-EA activities of our board members.”
I just had one follow-up question, a reminder of why I was asking in the first place: If all of that separation is true, how did the U.S. Olympic Committee get to hold a meeting in an EA world-headquarters conference room?
In a fate identical to most of my Olympics-related questions to officials since then, the answer was silence.
Aggressive secrecy and nonsense answers seem to radiate off Probst into everything he oversees. Boston 2024 is so over-the-top secretive, apparently by USOC command, that we don’t know why Boston’s bid was chosen or whether the mayor has even read it. And EA considers Larry snagging a room to be a state secret.
What we do know is that Mayor Walsh and Boston 2024 began selling out the city to the IOC within the bowels of the Worst Company in America—and the guy who helped it earn that title is now a dominant figure on their leadership team. May Boston see only another failed bid rather than another control-freak version of SimCity.
Photo: Larry Probst speaks, with Mayor Martin Walsh looking on, at the Olympics bid selection announcement in Boston on Jan. 9. (Photo by Boston Mayor's Office)
In its latest attempt to ram the 2024 Olympics down Boston’s gagging throat, the nonprofit-in-name-only bidding cabal Boston 2024 recently announced a new board highlighted by sports heroes Larry Bird and David Ortiz. But another big addition to the board gives Boston 2024 a direct connection to another famed, yet far less appealing, legacy: one of the world’s most hated video-game companies.
New Boston 2024 member Larry Probst is not only chair of the U.S. Olympic Committee. He’s also board chairman at Electronic Arts, a video-game maker known for parasitical corporate takeovers, invasive security measures, bullying methods of copyright enforcement, financial exploitation of athletes, and customer service that treats its public like an enemy. Which is to say, he’s a perfect fit with the Olympics, which is infamous for all of the above and worse.
A former Clorox executive and current overseer of a gift-card empire, Probst brings those same sensibilities to the worlds of sports and arts. On his watch, the USOC is known for being blundering, ham-fisted, and overly corporate and greedy even by the International Olympic Committee’s deranged standards, leading to internal frictions and humiliating U.S. Olympic bid failures.
Ditto for Electronic Arts, which has repeatedly infuriated and ripped off fans of its games during Probst’s service there in various leadership positions. Buying out companies to crank out shoddy sequels to their beloved games. Overbearing and spyware-ish digital rights management software. Contemptuous dismissal of public complaints. With those methods and behaviors, EA earned such nicknames as “Evil Empire.” Angry gamers famously got EA declared the “Worst Company in America” in The Consumerist’s annual poll two years in a row (2012 and 2013), beating out the likes of Bank of America and Walmart.
Just as the Olympics champions “amateur” athletics while pulling in billions of corporate-sponsorship and TV-rights dollars for itself, EA has been an athlete-exploiter. In 2013, EA settled a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against its use of the likenesses of college football and basketball players in its sports video games without permission or compensation, as ESPN reported.
In the sort of truth more insane than fiction, an Olympics bid organization that treats Boston like its private game of SimCity now includes the guy whose company actually makes SimCity. EA only bought out SimCity, and naturally managed to screw it up with a disastrous and invasive security regime—much like a real Olympics does to a real city. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Finland, which has fought off recent Olympics bids, also has produced a well-liked competitor to SimCity.)
Much like the Olympics, EA has apologized for its sleaze and scams and bullying, then pretty much gone on doing the same business as usual. I got a personal taste of this last fall, when I bought the acclaimed game Dragon Age: Inquisition, published by EA. Playing the game requires use of EA’s DRM software Origin, loathed for privacy violations and technical failures. Origin immediately broke, and since EA has deliberately done away with direct customer service contacts, getting help was a ludicrous chore. Finally accessing the game, I found it bug-riddled. After waiting a few weeks for bug-fixes, I tried again—to find Origin broken again. I haven’t summoned the willpower for another day-long help-war. Thus, EA has my money, and I have nothing, in the name of entertainment—a similar financial situation to most taxpayers in Olympic host cities.
The EA-Boston 2024 connection is not merely personal. In a link reported by few and understood by none, Boston and other would-be host cities made their first bid pitches to the USOC in December at EA’s world headquarters.
Boston’s bid and pitch were shrouded in secrecy and remain so. At that time, the public knew only that Boston 2024 had secretly crafted a bid—its venues pegged without public notice or input—and Mayor Marty Walsh had unilaterally signed on. Most local news stories said only that Walsh and Boston 2024 were making the pitch in “California,” a weirdly vague dateline.
Then I came across a photo of the Boston crew outside the bid location, and was surprised to see EA’s logo on the windows. I realized the pitches were being made at EA’s Redwood City HQ, and only by looking up EA’s executives did I learn the Probst-EA-Olympics connection.
The artistic side of me was intrigued by this relationship between the worlds of gaming and the Games. For a now-scrapped freelance piece, I reached out to EA for comment shortly after the Olympics bid-pitch meeting. Is EA, for example, considering making a new line of Olympics video games, or organizing Olympics-style eSports competitions? (Incidentally, the latter is starting to happen, at least at the international level.)
An EA spokeswoman shut me down.
“Larry Probst’s role on the USOC and the Electronic Arts board are completely separate and there is no relationship between the two organizations in the way you describe,” she said in an email. “EA employees aren’t exposed to or involved in any activities of the U.S. Olympic Committee and vice versa. We also can’t comment on the non-EA activities of our board members.”
I just had one follow-up question, a reminder of why I was asking in the first place: If all of that separation is true, how did the U.S. Olympic Committee get to hold a meeting in an EA world-headquarters conference room?
In a fate identical to most of my Olympics-related questions to officials since then, the answer was silence.
Aggressive secrecy and nonsense answers seem to radiate off Probst into everything he oversees. Boston 2024 is so over-the-top secretive, apparently by USOC command, that we don’t know why Boston’s bid was chosen or whether the mayor has even read it. And EA considers Larry snagging a room to be a state secret.
What we do know is that Mayor Walsh and Boston 2024 began selling out the city to the IOC within the bowels of the Worst Company in America—and the guy who helped it earn that title is now a dominant figure on their leadership team. May Boston see only another failed bid rather than another control-freak version of SimCity.