Industrial-sized video game publisher Electronic Arts is in negotations to buy the only real competitor in the sports game market Take-Two Interactive. Take-Two's shareholders want more than EA is offering and may be stalling until the release of the latest Grand Theft Auto installment. The two companies have taken their negotiations public by issuing dueling press releases — and CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman is tiring of it.

Electronics Arts CFO Warren Jenson has unexpectedly quit the company, public filings revealed yesterday. He'll continue to cash a $595,000-a-year salary through September 30, unless he lands a new job first, the FT reports. Jenson's abrupt departure comes as EA pursues an increasingly hostile bid to acquire rival videogame maker Take-Two Interactive. The bid, which Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Wienkes today predicted would end up successful, was largely CEO John Riccitiello's project, according to the AP.

Rejected by Take-Two management, Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello will take his bid to acquire the rival videogame maker straight to its shareholders, the Wall Street Journal reports. It's not quite the kind of violent carjacking you'd see in Take-Two's Grand Theft Auto, but that's how we'd like to imagine it, OK? EA has told shareholders it will buy outstanding Take-Two shares for $26 each. That's the same price Riccitiello offered last month, when it was a 50 percent premium over Take-Two's share price.

It's fitting; the Second Coming of the phone will get a game from On High. Alongside Apple's SDK demo today, Electronic Arts' Travis Boatman showed off a version of Will Wright's magnum opus Spore running on the iPhone. The release date hasn't been finalized, but the hope is it will coincide with the game's multi-platform release this September. That BART ride just got a helluva lot more interesting.

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello isn't content to sit idly by twiddling his thumbs until retirement. He'd rather spend as much as possible to keep his company relevant to the vanishing-attention-span generation of males whose spending pads his pension. They're interested in fast cars and sports — which makes Riccitiello keenly interested in EA rival Take-Two. Riccitiello has placed a $2 billion bid on Take-Two Interactive, the notorious publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series.

Three years after gaming god Will Wright and Electronic Arts announced it, Spore (previously called "SimEverything," a game where you use a one-celled organism to build the entire universe) finally has a release date of September 7, 2008. Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, stepped down from his platinum throne on Mount Olympus to tell Newsweek why it took so long: He had a hard time dumbing down his magical world for human minds. (Below is a gameplay demo that shows how Spore imitates every game from Pac-Man to Civilization, but better.) The game is a big bet for EA and Wright, but given that everyone's liked it for the last two years, looks like it'll still be a winner in the fall. (Yes, Spore is the Obama of video games.)

Curious: It's in Electronics Arts CEO John Riccitiello's best interest to get the company's board replaced, or the company sold. If only he were working at Yahoo, Microsoft would have a much easier time of things. EA has penned a "Key Employee Continuity Plan," a nice little safety net for its executives. If Riccitiello is fired without cause after a change in corporate control, he would receive $2.3 million. And 18 months of health coverage. God knows insurance can be expensive.

Charles Forman is currently building Blockles, a surprisingly Tetris-like online game for his dating site, Iminlikewithyou. Why do we suspect he's not going to be making any friends at Tetris owner Electronic Arts?

Electronic Arts is up to some serious fall cleaning. Today an internal memo from EA Games president Frank Gibeau revealed that EA's Chicago studio will be shut down. This is shortly after Electronic Arts posted its second-quarter revenues, which fell 18 percent to $640 million — and just a year after it opened the studio, which was responsible for the Fight Night franchise. This is just the latest in a series of cutbacks.

A leaked internal email indicates that the videogame behemoth Electronic Arts is vying to slash staff. The first of EA's studios CEO John Riccitiello will slash are Mythic and EA Redwood Shores. The email issued to Mythic employees says it will trim down through "attrition, performance management, stricter hiring guidelines and layoffs." Apparently, EA has started handing out pink slips, with more to follow. Would this have anything to do with EA's grand $860 million acquisition of BioWare and Pandemic Studios? Riccitiello spearheaded the purchase of both in 2005 when he was at private-equity firm Elevation Partners. What a lovely modus operandi: Profit today, screw people out of their jobs tomorrow.

Electronic Arts wants one console to rule them all. Every few years there's a "console war" in which hardware manufacturers, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony, bring new wares to market and upset the status quo. Electronic Arts is calling for an end to the madness. Why? It's too expensive to develop titles for multiple platforms. Instead, the company's executives are pushing a one-platform future in which, like CD and DVD players, anyone can manufacture a game console on which all games will play. Of course, EA — the Google of the videogame world — could easily make that happen by only publishing games for the PC. [BBC]

Videogame maker Electronic Arts is on the prowl for an acquisition in Japan to act as an Asiatic beachhead. Only 6 percent of its sales come from Asia, which seems absurdly low, considering the continent is home to the most popular videogame consoles, and well, only, say, most of the world's population. How long, exactly, has it taken EA to notice this fact? Granted it has subsisted, primarily, on the sales of steroidal sports games and World War II shooters that don't exactly mesh with the Japanese diet of saucy role-playing games, but it's shocking that a monolith of the gaming industry has such a rocky foothold in that territory — and that's it's taken the company this long to do something about it.

Electronic Arts is jumping into the ad-supported videogame field with a new title called Game Show. The free sports-trivia game is launching in October. Videogame publishers have been experimenting with the free-to-play business model as an alternative to the traditional model of charging for games, but EA's move is one of the biggest yet. [GameDaily Biz]

The morning news from our favorite Fortune 500 tech firms:

Valleywag's conference-going correspondent — or ConFonz, the name he's adopted for protection and lucrative merchandising ops — sends a multi-part report from the SF-hosted Game Marketing Conference. Why does ConFonz always get pushed out by dermatologists or dowagers?

Thanks to buyouts, takeovers, and downsizing, Silicon Valley has higher turnover than a suburban McDonald's. And not all the exits are voluntary. "Fatlimey" sends in the story of an Electronic Arts warez pirate:

Overheard while at lunch NVidia, about Electronic Arts Employees (that poor, downtrodden caste):