From “welcome to ea online”
to “Origin is closing its doors”

The capture is dated June 5, 1997. An earlier copy from February 21, 1997, the oldest our archive search returned, has the same badges. A baseball diamond and a jet are among the six pictures in the ring, and the wordmark in the middle says ea online in fat lowercase letters.

A blue bar across the top carries four buttons, starting with multiplayer matchup and ending with customer support and jobs/company info. At the bottom of the left rail, under a SURVEY button, the small print reads All files ©1997 Electronic Arts. The company had been founded in 1982 under another name, Amazin' Software.^[1]

The February 1998 capture keeps the frames, the studio rail and the ring, with different game pictures around the wordmark.

By April 29, 1999 the white entrance is gone. EA's homepage is now a dense portal in cyan and black: a Quick Search with Platform, Genre and Brand menus, four buttons for DEMOS, PATCHES, SITE MAP and TIPS & HINTS, and four boxes named EA STORE, EA PLAY, EA GAMES and EA SUPPORT.

The copy is loud. The store box shouts Good God!!! 12 new levels for Populous: The Beginning. The play box has It's Alive! Visit our newly rebuilt Multiplayer Matchup and find a worthy opponent to crush.

That is the matchup button from 1997, rebuilt.

The box to read is the small one at the bottom right. EA SUPPORT offers technical information online and gives a reason to use it: This is the same content EA|Support phone reps use, so you can save the cost of a call. Calling for help cost money, and the homepage said so.

Beside the EA logo, a list of ten labels runs from Electronic Arts and EA SPORTS through Westwood, Bullfrog and Maxis to Squaresoft and EA Partners. Origin is still on it, fifth from the top.

The June 20, 2000 capture keeps the cyan frame and refills the boxes. EA STORE now introduces one game, Meet The Sims, and explains it in a single line: In SimCity™ Will Wright gave you the power to build and control cities... with The Sims™ you'll create and control people!

EA GAMES runs a contest, Win FIVE FREE GAMES of your choice! and advertises games for PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and PC CD. A Features item asks if you missed the Electronic Entertainment Expo and offers Visit EA's E3 Booth Online. A Hot Spot goes darker: Into a Dark Dream You Drop..., with a mission to Free Wonderland from the Red Queen's virulent contagion. Wonderland comes back to this homepage in 2011.

The big box called This Week's Featured Title is empty in this capture. The line about saving the cost of a call is still in its corner, and an ESRB Privacy Certified seal sits by the copyright.

Four months later, in October 2000, EA launched a new EA.com, run as an online business of its own: subscriptions to games played on its websites, advertising, Internet-only games and a web store.^[2]

The August 13, 2003 capture is white and narrow, and it opens with four doors. Each brand gets its own heroes and one line. EA SPORTS BIG promises Experience mind-blowing adrenaline rushes., EA SPORTS The most realistic, in-your-face sports action., and EA GAMES All the fantasy, sci-fi and simulations you can play. The fourth door leads to Pogo, with Play games, win prizes and chat for free!

Under the doors, an announcement says The Sims Makin' Magic is coming, a browser game called Vert Skater asks how many tricks you can pull off on the half-pipe, and a row of game boxes carries Buy Now >> buttons, from Battlefield 1942: The Road To Rome on PC-CD to NCAA Football 2004 on PlayStation 2. AOL is everywhere: a TRY ALL NEW AOL 8.0 ad sits at the top of the right column, and the footer links run from Advertise through Piracy to Try AOL Free. Under the news, a badge brags FORTUNE 100 BEST COMPANIES TO WORK FOR 2003.

August 2004 keeps the four doors and restocks the shelf: Madden NFL 2005 at the top, The Sims 2 on pre-order, Catwoman and an Xbox Live Starter Kit in the boxes, and a balloon game sold with Get addicted to popping balloons!

By November 29, 2006 EA's homepage has gone dark. A Need for Speed Carbon car fills the left side, and the top bar names the whole family: EA, EA SPORTS, EA SPORTS BIG, EA MOBILE and POGO.com, then EA Store, Find a Retailer, Worldwide and Support.

On the right is a counter, 12104 Players Online, with an invitation underneath: Get into the EA Nation! A box below asks you to sign up for an all-access pass to online activities and competitions. The EA Nation's news for the week is music. Four October items, each an Official Soundtrack: NFS Carbon, NBA LIVE 07, Madden NFL 07 and NFL STREET 3. Lower down, a tile offers Games for your iPod.

The code has a small confession. Six times it says This text is replaced by the Flash movie. The large promotion area at the top of the 2006 capture is blank. The years on either side are missing too: requests for the 2005 homepage end on this same 2006 page, and the 2007 and 2008 captures open a language chooser or lose most of their styling.

In June 2009 the page turns white and puts a game behind it: the background art is from Spore Galactic Adventures. Next to the search box, an odometer counts the catalog: 0438 total games.

The left column offers to browse By Brand, By Genre or By Platform. The middle has Most Viewed (The Sims 3, FIFA Soccer 10 and Need for Speed SHIFT among them), an E3 Roundup and Play Free Games with three browser games: Mirror's Edge 2D, Mercenaries 2: World Nearly In Flames and Connect Four. The browser title spells out the reach, EA Video Games - Play Online PC Wii Xbox PS2 PS3 and DS Games.

Where Flash once played, the HTML still says You must have Flash and Javascript enabled to view this content! In our still the empty Flash panels are folded away, so the layout is tighter than the original.

On June 15, 2010 the same layout wears E3 colors. Purple fills both sides, yellow-and-red E3 logos tumble down them, and the EA logo itself becomes a glossy purple ball. The odometer now reads 0660, beside the slogan Any way you want to play.

A box promises Experience all the excitement of EA at E3 2010! with live streams, behind-the-scenes video and blogs. The news column sounds like a person wrote it: E3 is just days away, and you know EA is going to be there with our big, strapping corporate boots on!

On June 15, 2011 the EA logo sits in a circle on a thin white bar and Alice fills the screen: Alice: Madness Returns, Now Available, Explore Wonderland. The Wonderland teased in a small box in 2000 is now the whole background. The capture's HTML lists June 14 for Alice: Madness Returns under Upcoming Releases, the day before this capture.

The menu has a new last item, Shop at Origin. Twelve days earlier, on June 3, 2011, EA had launched Origin, its direct-to-consumer gaming platform; EA said more than 150 games were available, and that digital downloads of Star Wars: The Old Republic would be exclusive to Origin later that year.^[3] The Featured Games list on this page starts with Star Wars: The Old Republic. In the 1997 rail Origin was a studio label; in 2011 it is a shop, linked from the top of the homepage.

June 2012 keeps the circle, the columns and the Origin link, and gives the hero to The Sims 3: EMBRACE THE SUPERNATURAL IN A NEW SIMS EXPANSION.

In June 2013 a Battlefield soldier stands beside the headline GAMES THAT GAMERS LOVE, and the hero is an Origin sale: FROM NOW UNTIL JUNE 19 SAVE UP TO 70% ON OVER 150 GAMES. Over 150 games on sale, two years after EA said the store opened with more than 150 in all.^[3]

The Featured Games list lower down names five: FIFA 14, SimCity, Dead Space 3, Need For Speed Rivals and The Sims FreePlay. SimCity had a rough spring. Its launch servers had buckled, and on March 8, 2013 EA explained that a lot more people logged on than we expected.^[4]

A sentence later the apology went on: OK, we agree, that was dumb, but we are committed to fixing it. EA said it had raised server capacity by 120 percent in 48 hours and that disrupted experiences had dropped by roughly 80 percent, and it promised players who had activated SimCity a free game.^[4]

The circle-and-columns layout is still there in our 2014, 2015 and January 2016 captures, and the hero changes with the calendar. June 2014: E3 IS HERE! over Sims characters and footballers, a button to WATCH THE STREAM, and a news card for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil.

June 2015 turns blue for LIVE TO PLAY and WATCH EA AT E3. The menu has gained an item, EA ACCESS, between Blog and Help, with Shop At Origin still at the end. On January 1, 2016 the hero is the store itself: ORIGIN HOLIDAY SALE, UP TO 60% OFF, DISCOUNTS ALL WEEK LONG, with Star Wars Battlefront cards under it. The browser title of all three is the same, EA Games - Electronic Arts.

In June 2017 the columns are gone. The hero is one wide picture of armored figures flying over mountains with one button, Enter The Wilds. No game title is visible in the hero image.

The news cards below cover EA PLAY, FUT Icons in FIFA 18 (Ronaldo Nazário. Maradona. Pelé.) and Star Wars Battlefront II at EA PLAY.

This capture lacks its main menu and some thumbnails. The browser title changes too, from EA Games - Electronic Arts to Electronic Arts Home Page - Official EA Site, and it stays that way in every capture to 2026.

From here the hero of each June capture belongs to one game. In 2018 Cristiano Ronaldo, in a red Portugal shirt, sells a Free 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia Update. In 2019 Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order gets the whole screen, a dark portrait and two lines: The Galaxy awaits! and Become a Jedi on Nov 15.

June 2020 swaps the dark hero for a bright one: Star Wars: Squadrons, a pilot's helmet, TIE fighters and a date, Coming October 2, 2020.

Our June 2021 capture shows a red Electronic Arts wordmark in a white navigation bar, followed by a menu: Games, More Experiences, About, Commitments and Resources. The hero is F1 2021 in red and white, with confetti and flags. June 2022 belongs to Battlefield 2042, SEASON 01 ZERO HOUR, over a misty battlefield, with an ESRB Mature rating box in the corner of the picture.

The capture from January 1, 2023 opens with a look back, 2022: A Year Powered by Play, and a strip for a Battlefield event: BATTLE OF NORDVIK EVENT. THREE WEEKS. THREE EXPERIENCES. Scroll to Featured Games and there are six tiles: Dead Space, NFS Unbound, The Sims 4, FIFA 23, Madden 23 and Apex Legends. Over the Apex tile floats a small white box.

The covered tile belongs to Apex Legends. In February 2019, a week after its release, Vince Zampella reported more than 25 million players and well over 2 million concurrent players at the weekend peak.^[5]

EA had announced on October 6, 2022 that its Windows EA app had left open beta and would soon replace Origin as our primary PC platform. Saves and friends lists would move across, and Mac players stayed on Origin for the time being.^[7] EA had also announced that the base game of The Sims 4, the one in that grid, would be free to download for new players from October 18, 2022, and that it would keep making packs and kits.^[8]

There is no usable capture for 2024; both dates we tried stayed blank.

June 2025: the header is a blue EA roundel and the Electronic Arts wordmark, and the hero pairs EA Play and FC 25 logos on a dark purple panel beside a footballer celebrating in a white kit. The headline is Join EA Play and win for the club, and the small print explains: Manage your club to victory in EA SPORTS FC™ 25, now on The Play List.

The 2023 grid still had FIFA 23. On May 10, 2022 EA had announced that its football games would move to a new brand, EA SPORTS FC, in 2023, and listed what came with it: more than 300 licensed partners, more than 19,000 athletes, 700 teams, 100 stadiums and over 30 leagues.^[6]

Three months after this capture, on September 29, 2025, EA announced an agreement to be bought by PIF, Silver Lake and Affinity Partners for $210 a share in cash, an enterprise value of about $55 billion, with closing expected in the first quarter of EA's fiscal 2027 if regulators and shareholders approved.^[9]

The newest capture, January 1, 2026, gives its hero to one game. The hero's left half is Apex Legends holiday art, MERRY MAYHEM with a character in antlers and a teddy bear; the right half is the AMPED logo, one sentence, Feel the holiday rush in the Merry Mayhem Event., and a blue Learn More button.

The 1997 page put six games in a ring around ea online and listed its studios down the side, Origin fourth from the top. In 2023 a small box said Origin was closing its doors. The 2026 hero has room for one game, a logo and a button.

Six games around one wordmark in 1997. One game in the hero in 2026.ea.com, June 1997 → January 2026