EA Vancouver

EA Vancouver began as Distinctive Software, founded in Burnaby, British Columbia, by Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember after the success of their game Evolution, which Sydney Development Corporation agreed to publish in 1982, when Mattrick was 17. The studio opened in January 1983 and is now Electronic Arts' oldest and largest studio.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Distinctive was known for racing and sports games such as the Test Drive series, Stunts, 4D Boxing and Hardball II, many released under the Accolade label. In 1989 two of its programmers converted Sega's arcade game Out Run to MS-DOS using libraries written for Test Drive II. Accolade sued, but the court sided with Distinctive: the contract had transferred the rights to the game's concept and design, not to the underlying source code.

Electronic Arts bought Distinctive Software in 1991 and renamed it EA Canada, the studio where most EA Sports games are made. In 2002, when EA Seattle closed, half of its jobs moved to the studio, and the same year Black Box Games joined it as EA Black Box, which became a separate EA studio in 2005. In 2011 it acquired Bight Games, a maker of freemium games.

Now called EA Vancouver and still in Burnaby, the studio is best known for EA Sports and EA Sports BIG series such as EA Sports FC (formerly FIFA), NHL, SSX, NBA Street, NFL Street, EA Sports UFC and FIFA Street, as well as several NBA Live and NCAA Basketball games between 1994 and 2009. Its building, opened by Jean Chrétien in 1999, includes a motion-capture studio, video editing suites and rooms for composing music.