The rise and fall of the 3DO

RAIDEN1

RAIDEN1

Member
The 3DO had a lot going for it, and its games gave the early batch of Saturn and PSX games a run for their money (arguably Crash'N'Burn was the better game compared to the bodged port of Daytona on the Saturn), the video below talks about the men behind the hardware and what the vision was at the time.... ultimately though it ended up being the Dreamcast of the early to mid-90s...gone too soon..

 
The rise? lol.

I'm sure it's a fascinating video but that just makes me laugh. I honestly have no idea what the sales figures were but I remember seeing this in Best Buy as a kid and everyone knew, "that thing is shit..."

Back then it was all Sega/Nintendo, obviously. Most kids in my town knew that anything else would likely suck. Notable exception was the TG-16 but was super rare in my parts. Neo Geo too. That thing was legendary. Never played one in real life though, only heard stories from people about how expensive and big the games were. It was spoke about in hushed tones almost, "Dave has a neo geo!...Oh wow, isn't his dad a chiropractor??...Yea, he's super loaded, lives next to Britney, the house with the gorilla statue in the yard....I heard there were cameras in the gorilla's eyes...."

Actual conversation from back then.
 
3DO was a overpriced fucking piece of shit. It died because of Trip Hawkins hubris, not because it was a misunderstood engineered marvel of a machine. Paying 800 dollars circa 1993 for this garbage console and the only available launch game is Crash n Burn (ironic title, isn't it) is the equivalent of being robbed at gun point in broad daylight by a wheelchair bound stock broker. It's humiliation at its worst.
 
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fart town usa said:
The rise? lol.

I'm sure it's a fascinating video but that just makes me laugh. I honestly have no idea what the sales figures were but I remember seeing this in Best Buy as a kid and everyone knew, "that thing is shit..."

Back then it was all Sega/Nintendo, obviously. Most kids in my town knew that anything else would likely suck. Notable exception was the TG-16 but was super rare in my parts. Neo Geo too. That thing was legendary. Never played one in real life though, only heard stories from people about how expensive and big the games were. It was spoke about in hushed tones almost, "Dave has a neo geo!...Oh wow, isn't his dad a chiropractor??...Yea, he's super loaded, lives next to Britney, the house with the gorilla statue in the yard....I heard there were cameras in the gorilla's eyes...."

Actual conversation from back then.
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The system may not have set the world on fire but it was certainly a more capable machine than the likes of the CD32 and Jag ever were...it had the greatest Road Rash game ever developed, one of the best ports of Streetfighter around...but then had the dumb idea of just having one control port..
 
I happen to have a Neogeo. Its still kicking and sometimes I hook it up. Its a majestic console still. Hard to believe its from 1990. Playing Shodown 2 or KOF 98 on it is sick as fuck. Back then I couldn't afford it ofcourse, I bought it in the early 2k's.

But the 3DO? Never risen. It was a wreck from the get go. The plan was outsourcing hardware, but the thing was expensive and the games weren't that good. Playstation launched like a year later in Japan and had actually decent 3D for the time and it was cheaper. I felt like 3DO never really came out. It was there, but it went just as silently.
 
I loved my 3DO, but it never had a chance at its price.

Need for Speed, Road Rash and Get were great and all got a ton of playtime from me. After that, there wasn't a whole lot sadly.
 
I don't like that lady , mostly because all her videos are just redos of top hat gamer videos he has already done.

She's not copying .. they are together. It just rubs me the wrong way.
 
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I'm not sure 3DO had a rise and fall. That's a hyperbolic title. It didn't really rise enough to have a fall. The curve topped out early and then it was more of a slow, painful decline. It was a completely forgettable chapter in the history of video games that nobody would even talk about if people like Lady Decade didn't make retrospective documentaries about things like it.
 
I had a friend that was gifted a 3DO when it released. His parents were going through an acrimonious divorce and his Mom was buying him whatever he wanted. My thoughts at the time:

1. Road Rash looked amazing.
2. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties was a total scam. It was advertised as a FMV game, but was almost all still pictures.
3. My friend was crazy for not getting Neo Geo instead. That said, as kids during that era, it was pretty easy to be tricked into believing FMV stuff was cool.
 
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RoboFu said:
I don't like that lady , mostly because all her videos are just redos of top hat gamer videos he has already done.

She's not copying .. they are together. It just rubs me the wrong way.
Click to expand...

It's a grift to double down on Patreon subs. I doubt she's the one doing all the research and writing the scrips etc but I guess the "Gamer girl" simps are a rich vein of income.
 
nush said:
It's a grift to double down on Patreon subs. I doubt she's the one doing all the research and writing the scrips etc but I guess the "Gamer girl" simps are a rich vein of income.
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Except it's not. Is there some rule that there can only be one content creator with a patreon in a household? There's plenty of her stuff that I like way better than top hat gamer's stuff.
 
3DO was home to the definitive Demolition Man console game.

And imagine if the console did well and Naughty Dog's Way of the Warrior sold gangbusters. We may not have been blessed with all of their generation defining titles and just got more bad fighting games instead.
 
I liked the 3DO, a little bit. But it was too expensive. It was a little early to bank on a CD drive, and the outsourcing of the hardware was the wrong move. Plus it had a few design flaws.

But I'm not gonna crucify someone because they purchased a 3DO. I remember it was fancy at the time.
 
The only console with graphics immersive enough that you feel like Gex. Saturn and PS1 ports are sad attempts.
 
nush said:
It's a grift to double down on Patreon subs. I doubt she's the one doing all the research and writing the scrips etc but I guess the "Gamer girl" simps are a rich vein of income.
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Yeah that's the thing. It's the same scripts. Same b roll.

 
What rise?
It was a system that existed for a short period of time and that's it.
 
RoboFu said:
Yeah that's the thing. It's the same scripts. Same b roll.

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They are not the first youtube couple to do this either, I've seen this on other channels in the past. It's like going to a restaurant and being assigned two servers and being expected to tip both of them at the end when they are bringing food out from the same kitchen. Some people even claim the food tastes better when it's brought out by one server and not the other.
 
My uncle worked on a game for the 3DO called Immercenary. I thought it was the coolest thing ever as a kid. I didn't spend a lot of time with the 3DO but I do remember playing Road Rash and Need for Speed thinking they were both great.
 
Aside from Trip Hawkins' antics, there was nothing remotely interesting about this system. It's like someone looked at all the FMV crap on Sega CD and said, "Yeah this is what gamers want, but with more colors, and double the price."

Hats off to Hawkins for trying to shake up the industry, but it sounds like his arrogance was too big of an obstacle. He still seems like a decent dude to drink a beer with. I'll bet he's got some wild behind the scenes stories about the games industry.
 
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Neo_Geo said:
I wish I was Trip Hawkins so I could fuck her.
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i hear you
LCATaW_E5oez3gd9GoInOitDwy5_kVh_6G9qU1PHT20.jpg

nice pair she got
 
History has not been too kind to it, but when 3DO was announced it seemed pretty exciting. The footage they showed (well, pics, as it was all magazines back then) looked to be a major step above everything else, and the console's pedigree sounded like it might have a good shot at making some space for itself. The only other real Western hardware platform of note at the time was Atari's Jaguar, and that seemed pretty DOA. At least this thing seemed genuinely ambitious. I remember they got one in at the local second-hand game store not long after launch, and ogling at what was happening on the screen. It was obviously early, but compared to what we'd been looking at on SNES and Sega CD, these games looked like a true generational leap.

But then immediately after this, all that happened was basically... nothing. You'd go to Electronics Bougeek and there would be nothing interesting sitting on the shelf. 2 Putt Putt games? A Dennis Miller News "game?" That was all well and good, but if there was no actual fancy software besides this edutainment and multimedia drivel, it was basically impossible to feel any kind of excitement over this thing. The insane price tag was just the icing on the cake. Neo Geo cost megabucks as well, but at least it had tons of amazing looking games that you might actually WANT to play.

Lastly, beyond the initial expression of enthusiasm, coverage of the thing understandably fried up in the media immediately (as there was not really much to actually talk about, other than "wouldn't it be cool if..."). It felt crazy to think that a couple of generations earlier, NES could launch with a whole solid lineup of a variety of different games, and now we finally had this amazing tech that was just a shiny box with nothing really going on.
 
I remember seeing demo kiosks. Games looked like shit, terrible loading screens for the time, but Street Fighter sounded awesome with CD audio. Not sure how much better the graphics were as they looked pretty similar to Genesis I had.

 
I got a used 3do at the local game shop i went to a a kid. I loved it back then. I don't regret getting it. I played it a lot and got to try many games on it thanks to the store being cool and you could pay anything in the store as a demo as long as it was already opened. Even got my launch ps1 from them about a week before release when I was older. They had a Japanese ps1 to Anna so many import games it was amazing
 
3DO was the only machine to get bigger sprites in Super Street Fighter, Samurai Showdown WITH Q sound.

The pack in racing game WAS really good and Wing Commander 3 heart of the Tiger was available for it as well

gex was okay, the game show game was okay.. I was lucky my parents spoiled me.
 
MachRc said:
The pack in racing game WAS really good and Wing Commander 3 heart of the Tiger was available for it as well
Click to expand...
Crash n Burn right? I watched a few videos now. For its time, not bad at all. Small sample size of clips I saw but there wasnt a lot of pop in polygons. It looks like they designed the tracks in such a way pop in was limited. A typical Saturn or PS racing game had tons of pop in.
 
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It really was a great racing shooting game. The graphics were really good for that time. My parents bought me PO'ed and The Horde too which just had FMV acting.
Return Fire was okay too..

I remember Total Eclipse...


It wasnt my favorite system. But it was way better(edit:graphically) than the Super Nintendo.
I had street fighter and samurai showdown on the SNes and you can tell right away on the 3DO Super Street Fighter and Samurai showdown was way better at giving you arcade quality feel.
The sound and again the way bigger/ better sprites.

I wish I had some photos
 
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The only coverage this piece of crap got was in gamefan magazine imo but they always did games justice usually. However you might see some weirdo shop running a 3do with gex at the mall. But any time, any period there were ALWAYS better options.

3do is an ironic nostalgic piece of crap for depressed millennials who want to relive the experience of seeing that 3do logo with the colored vertical shapes. Since gaming from that era ended in like the 90s it's people wanting to relive absolutely anything from that era so why not let's drop x amount of hundreds of dollars on some vintage piece of crap. Because weird and possible dopamine spike from opening a box and seeing 3do? Dude no
 
wondermega said:
But then immediately after this, all that happened was basically... nothing. You'd go to Electronics Bougeek and there would be nothing interesting sitting on the shelf. 2 Putt Putt games? A Dennis Miller News "game?" That was all well and good, but if there was no actual fancy software besides this edutainment and multimedia drivel, it was basically impossible to feel any kind of excitement over this thing
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I worked in EB and this was so true, the god games sold out and were never restocked leaving dross on the shelf.

I remember this one guy who owned a 3Do, overweight greasy-haired shut-in would often come into the store with his old grey haired mother. One day he came in by himself and brought all 4 of the Vivid video released we had put on clearance. These were ultra soft core porn titles, staff in my store had already checked them out and knew they were absolute shite.

A few days later this guys mom came in by herself pulled out those 4 discs from her bag and asked for a refund. The guy had sent his mum in to get a refund on his shitty porn. :messenger_tears_of_joy:
 
RAIDEN1 said:
The system may not have set the world on fire but it was certainly a more capable machine than the likes of the CD32 and Jag ever were...it had the greatest Road Rash game ever developed, one of the best ports of Streetfighter around...but then had the dumb idea of just having one control port..
Click to expand...
Couldn't you daisy chain controllers for multiplayer?
 
SkylineRKR said:
I happen to have a Neogeo. Its still kicking and sometimes I hook it up. Its a majestic console still. Hard to believe its from 1990. Playing Shodown 2 or KOF 98 on it is sick as fuck. Back then I couldn't afford it ofcourse, I bought it in the early 2k's.

But the 3DO? Never risen. It was a wreck from the get go. The plan was outsourcing hardware, but the thing was expensive and the games weren't that good. Playstation launched like a year later in Japan and had actually decent 3D for the time and it was cheaper. I felt like 3DO never really came out. It was there, but it went just as silently.
Click to expand...
Neogeo is still on my bucket list but I can't bring myself to pay those prices for the games. Emulation is good enough.
 
I wanted one of these more than anything. I didn't even know Sony was putting out a console but saw Warhawk and spent my money on that.
 
Some say the system was ahead of its time....a system brought in to be the standard for videogames, like VHS was for video...compared to the competition at the time (CD32 and Jag) the games were miles ahead of those 2...and for something that came out in 1993 at that time it was on another level...and I am not just talking about the price either...
 
3DO was a pretty rad piece of hardware when it came out, but it came out a little too early (see also: Dreamcast), and it was way too expensive.

I have one, purchased years after the system's life, but years before the collector's market made buying old systems miserable. Since it plays burned CDs just fine, I had a ton of fun playing through nearly the whole library.
 
I remember demoing one at Electronics Boutique back in the day. Even then it was clear to me the thing would be an abysmal failure. And to date that is the only 3DO I ever saw.
 
Mr Hyde said:
3DO was a overpriced fucking piece of shit. It died because of Trip Hawkins hubris, not because it was a misunderstood engineered marvel of a machine. Paying 800 dollars circa 1993 for this garbage console and the only available launch game is Crash n Burn (ironic title, isn't it) is the equivalent of being robbed at gun point in broad daylight by a wheelchair bound stock broker. It's humiliation at its worst.
Click to expand...
The hardware was extremely impressive during the time it released, but the time it released was arguably the peak of the 16-bit generation. Like, 3DO came out BEFORE Super Metroid and Donkey Kong Country and Sonic 3, when 16-bit was selling at its fastest rate. At that moment, 3DO was MILES ahead of anything else on the market. But, of course, it would find itself well behind the systems releasing in 1995 and 1996, which was a time when people were much more ready to move on. I think that context is sometimes lost on younger gamers who think of 3DO as being positioned against PSX and N64, when in reality those systems were still years away.
Krappadizzle said:
My uncle worked on a game for the 3DO called Immercenary. I thought it was the coolest thing ever as a kid. I didn't spend a lot of time with the 3DO but I do remember playing Road Rash and Need for Speed thinking they were both great.
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Legit one of the best games to be stranded on the 3DO.
 
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