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Peter Moore is one of the most memorable executives the game industry has ever seen. He presided over the Dreamcast at Sega of America and the Xbox at Microsoft and helped stoke the fires of the console wars. We still debate whether that tattoo was real to this day, but Moore's final stop in the game industry is perhaps the most notable. He did, after all, lead the sports division of EA during the span when the publisher was voted the Worst Company in America in 2012 and 2013.
"We were voted, two years in a row, the Worst Company in America, because of the ending of Mass Effect," Moore explains in an interview with The Game Business. "I mean, seriously, this is where BP is polluting the Gulf of Mexico – sorry, the Gulf of America," he adds with a touch of sarcasm. "Bank of America has brought down the global economy with subprime mortgages. But fucking Colonel Shepard dies in Mass Effect 3, and that makes us the Worst Company in America. So we went through that."
Moore might have gotten Commander Shepard's title wrong, but he's right about one thing: compared with companies doing existential harm against the environment and global economy, a game studio making a bad creative decision seems like small potatoes. But the Worst Company in America title was voted by readers of the now-defunct outlet The Consumerist, and there's no stopping gamers once you've given them an online poll through which to vent their anger.
Moore decided to meet those gamers where they were, he explains. "At that point, I jumped on Twitter," he says, and remarkably seems to believe that was the right call. "Many of you might remember that. I started engaging with gamers and all of the baggage that comes through that. But I felt it was the best way to start figuring out how we could humanize the face of EA. You know, we were, and probably still are, criticized."
Moore's read on the situation is a bit simplistic, but history tends to coalesce into simple narratives as the years roll on. EA's Worst Company in America awards weren't just about the Mass Effect 3 controversy – which, in turn, wasn't just about Shepard's fate. They were also a way to criticize the controversial always-online launch of SimCity in 2013. They were a protest against the company abandoning Steam in favor of a proprietary app. They were pushes against free-to-play games and microtransactions.
Those were all points that Moore was willing to acknowledge in a 2013 blog post, published shortly before the second award was finally determined. He also noted that some of EA's critics were pushing against the latest Madden cover athlete and "LGBT" inclusiveness. "That last one is particularly telling," Moore wrote at the time. "If that's what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we're not caving on that." (There is, of course, an all-new set of reasons to fear the company dropping those inclusive goals.)
It's worth noting, to Moore's point, that BP did get the Worst Company title in 2011, closer to when the Deepwater Horizon oil spill actually happened. And Bank of America was named the runner-up in 2011, 2012, and 2013. But maybe economic and environmental watchdogs just had better things to do with their time than voting in an online poll.
"Every day, millions of people across globe play and love our games – literally, hundreds of millions more than will vote in this contest," Moore wrote in that old blog. "So here's my response to this poll: We can do better. We will do better. But I am damn proud of this company, the people around the globe who work at EA, the games we create and the people that play them."
