It might be a footnote on the CV of EA cofounder Trip Hawkins, but Digital Chocolate is among the most influential mobile game companies ever created.
Industry legend Hawkins worked with the founding team at Apple before setting up EA, 3DO and myriad other companies, including Digital Chocolate and current venture GFAL.
And today’s mobile games industry would look very different were it not for Hawkins and Digital Chocolate, particularly in Finland. The list of ‘DChoc’ alumni that now run mobile game companies, or hold other influential roles today, is extraordinary.
Most notably, Hawkins and Digital Chocolate saw the potential in a small Finnish outfit called Sumea, one cofounded and led by Ilkka Paananen, and acquired it in 2004. That core Sumea team went on to set up Supercell, of course, but there are countless other Digital Chocolate graduates at the top of today’s mobile game business.
Many of them still keep in touch, and some refer to themselves as part of the ‘DChoc mafia’ – mobile’s own version of the Paypal mafia currently running big tech (and more recently parts of the US government).
That ‘DChoc mafia’ includes Sonja Ängeslevä (Phantom Gamelabs), Gerard Fernandez (Omnidrone, Scopely), David Fernandez Remesal (King, Sandsoft), Antti Hattara (StarBerry), Mishka Katkoff (Savage), Emmi Kuusikko (GameHouse), Jami Laes (Futureplay), Marko Lastikka (EA, Zynga, Netflix), Henric Suuronen (Play Ventures), Eric Seufert (Mobile Dev Memo), Manel Sort (King), Mika Tammenkoski (Metacore) and plenty more.
Today, Hawkins estimates that there are now “hundreds of CEOs” across gaming and tech that have previously worked for him. And what many Digital Chocolate alumni excel at is combining the art and business of games, he says. “The whole idea of a free-to-play game and a virtual economy…that was a fresh, new idea,” recalls Hawkins.
“Most developers and game designers know how to make a good game mechanic, a core loop that’s fun. Trying to design an economy is a very different situation,” he continues. “What had to be done is to knit those two together, and some people actually are really good at that.”
Hawkins describes himself as a natural teacher, an egalitarian leader and “one of the first executives to understand the concept of culture as a method of organisation for business”. “I was already working on those ideas when I was still in school,” he says.
He was lucky to attend a business college that taught students about the importance of company culture, he says. And Hawkins first got to apply those ideas in practice at Apple from 1978 to 1982, working among Apple’s core original team, including Steve Jobs.
The company grew from about 50 people to 4,000 in that four-year spell, he says, but Apple was losing its unique culture as a result.
“I go to Apple, and Apple is this tiny little thing….and of course, it has a unified culture, because you wouldn’t have gone to work there unless you were as crazy as everyone else about what we were going to do,” he tells us. “And then we kind of ruined the culture in the time I was there, about the time it was getting close to 1,000.”
Hawkins says he confronted Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with the problem, saying: “‘Guys, now you may not realise this, we actually have a culture…these are the values and how it works, and we’re losing it. And the only people can fix it are you’.”
“And they say, ‘Trip, you’re right. That is a great idea, but we’re too busy, so you do it,'” says Hawkins. “So I became the official person for creating and defining the formal Apple culture.”
Hawkins says that he continued to be a guardian and evangelist for company culture throughout his career, identifying the values most vital to each company and leaning on those to make decisions.
Most importantly, though, company values must be passed from management throughout the firm – and from generation to generation.
“I wanted to be really good at that, and that’s how you get this diaspora,” adds Hawkins, referring to the ‘DChoc mafia’. “I probably helped a lot of these people realise they could do it, like Steve Jobs helped me realise I could do it.”
Digital Chocolate didn’t survive the transition from early smartphones through Facebook into the App Store, but its influence remains strong. Ilkka Paananen once referred to his time at Digital Chocolate under Trip Hawkins as his “MBA in gaming” – clearly, the rest of the ‘Dchoc mafia’ learned a thing or two as well.
