The Story Of The 3DO - The Console Born From EA's Founder & Makers of The Atari Lynx & Amiga 1000

this is actually representing about a 50 times jump inequality and the performance for the graphics and the animation and that is a bigger leap in one generation than ever before in the history from too early before the Sony Playstation or Sega Saturn the 3do arrived to the home console market in 1993 and along with it came the promise of the next generation of gaming and a home multimedia machine films like Jurassic Park and arcade games like Virtua Fighter had what the public's appetite for CGI but home consoles at the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis even with their various add-ons and custom cartridge chips couldn't fully deliver what the public wanted the 3do was supposed to change all of us the 3do was planned to be both more powerful and cheaper than a PC but texture mapping capabilities a double speed cd-rom modem and the multitasking operating system the 3do really did seem like the next big thing and many agreed it was covered in mainstream newspapers featured on major mourning and financial TV shows it was one of the darlings of CES in 1992 and 1993 and was Time Magazine's 1993 product of the year so where did it all go wrong why aren't we in which should be the middle of a 3do force production cycle to find out we're going to look at how the founder of EA teamed with the co-creators of the original Amiga computer and atari lynx to create one of the most anticipated pieces of gaming hardware from the 90s only to see it failed to capture the market that seemed to covet it this is the story of the 3do what time will my daughter be home the passive type probably plays Nintendo what time will my daughter be home somewhere between 10:00 and 2:00 the aggressive type probably plays Sega what time am I gonna be home you went her back and the other time definitely plays video the most advanced home gaming system in the universe the 3do interactive multiplayer or simply the 3do as it's more commonly known was a product of the 3do company which was founded in 1991 by trip Hawkins Hawkins himself is an important figure in the video game industry and whether you know who he is or not chances are that trip has impacted or shaped some of your gaming experiences back in 1982 well before he became the founder of the 3do company he started another little company you may have heard of Electronic Arts the the area where the greatest challenges will comment is is in looking for original ideas and new creative ways to break the mold and a lot of people look at what other people have done and try to do something that's a spinoff from that but the the really creative geniuses in the industry are capable of coming up with something completely new Tripp was a forward thinker and a meticulous planner according to trip while working for a computer think tank in 1975 he calculated that 1982 would be the year in which there would be enough people with a computer in their home to sell games to EA flourished for years under Tripps leadership and he remained on EA's board when he left to formed 3do company while Tripp was the face and mastermind behind the 3do x' brand the hardware and software was designed by David needle and Robert RJ McHale before working on the 3do David and RJ had already been collaborating together for years most famously on the Amiga 1000 and the atari lynx already best friends for nearly a decade the pair complemented each other well needle would design micro processors and other hardware while RJ would write system software despite being technologically innovative the atari lynx never achieved the commercial success of the gameboy or the sega game gear and by September of 1991 David and RJ were already working on creating the next big thing the two former amiga designers met with ex Amiga President David Motor Centre Sarat and design the basics of what would eventually become the 3do on a napkin the trio formed new technologies group and began working on developing their newest project and fundraising David Nadel and RJ McHale put together a prototype in RJ's home office to showcase the unit's capabilities one frame at a time David and RJ showed their demo to various people in the video game industry including trip Hawkins trip Hawkins knew David and our Jason Cedillo's early days an Amiga trips Electronic Arts had been an early supporter of Amiga and on a personal level trip felt the three were kindred spirits reflecting back on his meeting with David and RJ Tripp said they'd made some very important decisions they were the same decisions that I would have made rather than me start a brand new team and starting from scratch it just made a lot of sense to me to try and join forces with them and shape what they were doing into what I wanted it to be trip Hopkins 2013 trip had been looking to create a true next-generation system for some time and this seemed like the perfect opportunity new technologies group became part of trip Hawkins newly created 3do company and having helped establish the corporate base the technology would need to survive David Morse moved on to other ventures during the 1992 CES the 3do was revealed to the press and public afterwards everyone seemed to want a piece of it the 3do received coverage in the business sections of mainstream newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune it was profiled by Time magazine Newsweek and US News CNN and CNBC erred segments and the following year trip Hawkins was offered the keynote speech at 1993 summer CES allegedly besting Bill Gates who had requested that honor anchors and other investors were also eager to invest this is a concept sale it hasn't happened yet it looks like it's coming together get might fail they can be perfectly honest and open about it so why not work guys and people are still just writing checks like that it's the latest public offering to take Wall Street by storm a look inside the dynamics of 3do a Bay Area multimedia the 3do was coming and the press public and video game industry all seem to agree that it was going to be a big deal trip had no desire for the 3do company to man facture their own consoles instead the console specifications designed by david and rj would be licensed to hardware manufacturers and turn 3do would receive royalties on each console sold the 3do company would also receive a $3 royalty for each game that was sold 3do $3 royalty was significantly lower than the royalties developers and publishers had to pay to Sega and Nintendo and helped to eventually attract more than 300 officially licensed developers by late 1993 though not all of those would go on to release 3do games trip in the 3do company met with a number of potential manufacturers but the - they wanted the most were Sony and Panasonic the two largest consumer electronic companies in the world at the time when 3do approached Sony they were already in the midst of development for the Sony Playstation however the 3do was quite a bit ahead of them in terms of development Sony had a choice between coming to the market sooner as a 3do manufacturer or waiting until they could bring their own product to the marketplace Sony as we all know chose to wait in the end it would be Panasonic who would build and release the first 3do console in March of 1990 three months before they would even release a console for sale the 3do company entered the stock market and its initial public offering valued the company at over 59 million dollars seven months later and approximately four years after being designed on a paper napkin in a restaurant the 3do was finally here and it was real [Music] [Music] [Applause] the real tree do interactive multiplayer commanders on it with the hottest indie games on earth welcome Panasonic's sz1 real 3do interactive multiplayer was the first 3do machine to hit the market when it was released in the United States in October of 1993 for $699 drastic Park interactive was supposed to be included at the launch title but it like several of the 3d O's initial titles suffered from delays and development crash and burn a game developed by Crystal Dynamics a company that conveniently enough was co-founded by David Morse replaced Jurassic Park interactive as a 3d O's big launch title while it may not have had the brand recognition of Jurassic Park crash & burn was positively reviewed by most critics with game pro going as far as to say that it had the most outrageous graphics you've ever seen on a home system in recent years the 3do has been somewhat lumped in with the CDI and is often thought of as a concert that relied heavily on interactive movies with full motion video games this is Ursula Scott commander of colonial star 1 we are under attack repeat under attack my ship has been overrun by the black brigade captain Talon is in control of the star splitter cannon they're beaming colonists support black dragon attack and while it did have its fair share of FMV titles the 3do actually had a fairly large library of games many of which were considered to be quite good the 3do played host to standout titles such as road rash slayer killing time star control 2 and its best selling game gags to name a few it was also the home of some very strong ports all alone in the dark Samurai Shodown Wing Commander 3 and Super Street Fighter 2 turbo the 3d o--'s ability to run high quality games wasn't a shock to anyone if anything it was expected at the time the 3do was considered quite powerful for a home console under its hood the 3do packed a 12 and a half megahertz 32-bit CPU two megabytes of RAM one megabyte of video RAM support for Dolby surround sound and was capable of up to a 640 by 480 resolution the 3do featured two video processors designed by David Neil the twin GPUs handle drawing the image which then left the CPU and a math coprocessor free to concentrate on calculating positions resulting in very fast real-time polygons being generated the 3do had all the makings of a successful launch trip Hawkins and his company had created a buzz they were armed with a massive advertising campaign and a powerful console dozens of manufacturers and hundreds of developers had signed on to make 3do hardware and software and there were going to be numerous titles available at launch Electronic Arts even took out two page ads in magazines heralding the 3do as the next big technological leap in gaming and promising to deliver 20 new 3do titles over the next 12 months unfortunately the 3do launch didn't go quite as expected as well as crash and burn may have been received by fans and critics it simply wasn't enough to make up for the fact that when the 3do launched it ended up being the only game that was available according to electronic gaming monthly this was due to 3do making chain the hard work practically up to the launch date which in turn didn't leave developers enough time to fully complete or test their games by the consoles launch date this may also help to explain why there was a shortage of consoles available for sale at launch but some stores only receiving one or two units by the time the 3do was actually released some of the fervor and anticipation for it had waned and with an eye to the future tomorrow begins today Nintendo the world's leader in video games has joined forces with Silicon Graphics the world's leader in visual computing to introduce the most exhilarating breathtakingly realistic 3d video entertainment ever witnessed the project reality though none would be available anytime soon Nintendo's project reality which would become the n64 Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation were all already announced prior to the 3d of going on sale and the Atari Jaguar a system that was marketed as a 64-bit machine was set to be released just one month after the 32-bit 3do these announcements from established console manufacturers combined with the 3do inability to deliver more than one title at launch gave many consumers reservations about spending six hundred ninety nine dollars on a new and untested brand a few more titles appeared the following month but by early 1994 just a few months after its launch the 3do was already in trouble trip Hawkins knew that changes needed to be made and fast hi I'm trip Hawkins I'd like to tell you why 3do is going to be the biggest product in your storage since the VCR trip knew that the 3do $699 price tag was a big deterrent to the average consumer most console manufacturers such as Sega and Nintendo often sold their consoles at a loss knowing that they would later make up the loss through the high royalties they would receive from each licensed game that was sold trips decision to license out the manufacturing of the console to other companies allowed 3do to set the royalty rate at a low $3.00 per game which in turn attracted hundreds of developers unfortunately it also meant that 3d o--'s console manufacturers wouldn't collect any money from game publishers and day themselves owing royalties to the 3do company had to sell their machines at a price that allowed them to make a profit this resulted in high prices and low sales for 3do consoles to help solve this problem trip Hawkins had said that he worked out a deal with Panasonic to reduce the price of the console while Panasonic attributed the reduction in price to chip integration and a reduction of parts cost whatever the reason for it may have been in April of 1994 the price of Panasonic's fz1 3do was reduced to $499 later that year Gold Star released their version of the 3do for $399 matching the upcoming launch price of the Sega Saturn by the end of 1994 the 3do was now over 40% cheaper than when it launched and had slowly but surely built a respectable library of games despite growing their library of titles and reducing the retail price of their consoles 1994 was a difficult year for the 3do company in March of 1994 GamePro magazine covered the 3do s falling stock market price plummeting from 37 dollars a share to $23 in December of 1993 going into 1994 when the 3do company announced their financial figures for their April 1994 to march 1995 fiscal year they reported that they had nearly tripled the revenue over the previous year but even so the company still operated at a loss to the tune of forty six point three million dollars things only got worse as 1995 delivered a vicious one-two punch to the 3do first the Sega Saturn was released in North America in May of 1995 the 3do drop in price helped it to at least remain competitive and stave off some of the Saturn's impact but September would deliver their biggest challenge yet on September 9th 1995 the PlayStation was released in North America and the PlayStation was only $299 1995 could have been a banner year for the 3do with some of its best received and best selling games being released that year instead as the year went on both the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn continued gaining momentum over the 3do and developers had taken notice many 3do games some previously exclusive to the 3do were ported to the PlayStation but the loss that hurt them most particularly on a personal level as ei the decision can back the playstation over the 3do I realized that ena was stabbing us in the back they were not going to have any exclusive games on three do they were all going to show up on PlayStation if you're a developer and you know that Electronic Arts was really the place that 3do got conceived and birth and that even Electronic Arts is moving into PlayStation and that's what you're going to do trip Hopkins 2013 the loss of exclusive titles was a huge blow 3do began making games themselves hawkins 3do company and EA the company he originally founded were now competitors and as such trip Hawkins couldn't continue as chairman of both companies trip Hawkins left Electronic Arts the 3do company ended 1995 with two major developments first in December of 1995 gold star dropped the price of the 3do to $199 taking a loss of over $100 on each unit sold to offset the losses gold star themselves entered the developer space but weren't very successful second despite the 3do trouble a successor named the 3do m2 had been in developed rather than have the console produced by multiple manufacturers 3do sold the exclusive manufacturing rights for the m2 to Matsushita that are known as Panasonic in December of 1995 through the sale of the rights of m2 technologies the 3do finally turned a profit in the first quarter of 1996 with a net income of 1.2 million dollars this victory would be short-lived the Sony Playstation dominated 1996 and by the end of the year it was clear that the 3do wouldn't be able to compete in December of 1996 the 3do company shut down all hardware development for both the 3do and the m2 going forward the 3do company would develop and publish games for the PC and other console manufacturers the 3do console was no more 3d o--'s tenure as a game developer would only last 7 years in 2003 the company filed for bankruptcy and the company's intellectual properties were sold to its former rivals the 3do was also released in Japan and Europe but it didn't fare well enough in either region to save it from its demise trip Hawkins has said that looking back he wishes he had stayed at EA and if he could go back in time he wouldn't launch the 3do post 3do trip Hawkins has stayed involved in the gaming industry in 2003 he founded the mobile game company Digital Chocolate in 2013 he launched a new startup if you can aimed specifically at teaching kids about compassion and anti-bullying through gaming and most recently trip Hawkins added Professor to his list of accomplishments when he joined University of California Santa Barbara as a professor of practice and technology management program in 2016 after the 3do rj McHale worked in mobile and online gaming development until 2005 when he would go on to work for Sony creating development tools for the PlayStation 3 and Vita RJ left Sony in 2011 and founded his own games company are jinx and is also currently working on researching machine consciousness for Google I wasn't able to find much information regarding David needles post 3do work but he did file for several patents on inventions he created or co-created apparently while working for a company named jovial test equipment unfortunately David needle passed away on February 20th 2016 his contributions to the Amiga 1000 atari lynx the 3do and the industry as a whole will not be forgotten the 3do was powerful easy to develop for and well supported during its brief three-year run the 3do had over 275 games released worldwide and sold 2 million units sadly crips vision for a high-end video game and multimedia console was ahead of its time and the 3do wasn't able to overcome its poorly handled launch and pricing quickly enough together the market share would need to compete against Sony Playstation despite being discontinued in 1996 homebrew developers have taken to creating hacks mods and even entirely new games for the 3do the 3do may no longer be in production but it's story continues I'd like to thank historic nerd for providing the voice of trip Hawkins in this episode if you're into gaming retrospect like myself or historical videos movie reviews I highly recommend you check out his channel if you'd like to help my little channel grow please feel free to share this video on reddit or other social media but most importantly thank you for watching

Channel: Wrestling With Gaming

Views: 578,348

Keywords: 3DO history, story of the 3DO, 90s gaming consoles, 3DO gameplay, trip hawkins, gaming history, 3do interactive multiplayer (video game platform), 3do, video game history, wrestling with gaming, history of the 3DO, crash n burn, 3d0, 3DO, way of the warrior, electronic arts, best 3do games, why did the 3do fail, 3do review, 3do commercial, 32 bit consoles, dave needle, amiga 1000, atari lynx history, amiga 1000 history

Id: BzKF3h1Uc70

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Qwarkster]

That was really interesting. The 3DO came out when I was really young, so I didn't even know about it till years later, and the only game I know from them is Army Men. I had no idea the console had so many games, I thought it was as much of a flop as the CDi.

[u/ducked]

I was looking through the first party 3do games a few weeks ago to see if there was anything of interest. They developed under the name studio 3do at the time. Here's a list of their games I found.

Twisted the game show actually looked pretty interesting as far as really weird fmv games go. Escape from monster manor looked like a subpar doom clone but still interesting cause there wasn't anything else like that on consoles in 1993 as far as I know. Soccor kid looked like kind of a generic platformer. The only other game that looks really notable to me is killing time which looks like a pretty unique fps but unfortunatlely has an abysmal framerate. But fortunately killing time just recently got a remaster for pc and is on gog and steam. Gonna have to check that out some time.

Anyways I never had a 3do but I think it's pretty interesting. I think it could have been successful if it had started out with a killer app like how nintendo had mario 64. I wonder if there's any other forgotten exclusive hidden gems on the system.

I also prefer the need for speeds graphics on 3do over the later versions.

edit: also r/3do exists btw

[u/APeacefulWarrior]

So... what's up with Trip Hawkins being hung up on square-circle-triangle arrangements in his logos?

[u/UncleTouchysDungeon]

Oh man I loved the 3DO as a kid. There were tons of awesome games for it like Road Rash, Need for Speed, Samurai Shodown, Crash N Burn ,Captain Quazar, Lucienne's Quest etc. However that thing was fucking doomed from the start and it also had the weird port on the controller to plug a second controller into for multiplayer.