This past weekend, EA Digital Platform hosted its first-ever Hackathon bringing together employees and local engineering talent for a communal, web-based coding competition that pitted teams against each other to solve various programming challenges, all entwined within a science fiction narrative. It was light on the algorithmic brain teasers, heavy on the coding, with skill-sets that ranged from Java/J2EE and Python to HTML5 and MySQL.

Teams gathered in the early morning at our Redwood Shores campus to kick off the competition and there was a team quite early on who demonstrated themselves as the team to beat. They cleaned the prize table for most of the event, but just when you thought it might be a clean sweep, the tide started to turn and another team had a major comeback.

With big prizes on the line, there was a photo finish to determine the winner as a different team grabbed the grand prize and demonstrated in their victory that you just never know which way an event like this will end! The Elementalists took home the big prize of a lunch with our CTO Rajat Taneja, $1,000 in cash each and a selection of EA games. After running around and sharing some high-fives, other high scoring teams were awarded their prizes for the competition.

Check out some photos from the event!