Going into the videogame system wars is always tricky, especially if you are trying something new. The 3DO company was started by Trop Hawkins in 1991, and quickly moved on to have it's own system that was manufactured by several third party companies like Panasonic and Goldstar. The 3DO system launched in October 1993 to a huge buzz, although the gaming industry was changing again. As the father of the 32-bit era, the 3DO by all rigfhts should have been a big impact player, and although it has a fairly large underground fan base, the 3DO did not do as well as some hoped it would. Competition for the system was fierce as not only did Sega have the Genesis and Sega CD, but there was also the Super Nintendo, The Atari Jagaur made it's release with the first ever 64-bit system, the Phillips CD-i waited in the ranks and then there was also ther SNK Neo Geo system sitting there on it's heels as well.
A major problem for the system was the fact that it released at $700.00 US, and that really hurt the systems sales right there. The CD-i and Neo Geo also faced the same fate as well. It was not until Panasonic released it's FZ-10 that there was a major price drop to the machine. Plus factor in the fact that the gaming industry had also been bitten by the Fighting Game bug and oyou have another reason why the 3DO did not do as well as it could have as the system was lacking a strong library of fighting games and a decent fighting pad that was easily accessible by it's users. The 3DO did excell in other areas thoughj as the system hands down has the best library of FMV games available as well as strong entrants in the Strategy genre like Panzer General, Perfect General, and the Cult Classic Return Fire. Otyher things to help lure fans to the 3DO are Jaguar fans that will jump on out of curiosity of games that released for the system that were supposed to release for the Jaguar that didn't.
Electronic Arts was a huge developer for the 3DO as Trip Hawkins, the Ex President at EA pulled the strings to get top notch games onto the system as many will argue that Road Rash, Need For Speed, Syndicate, and Wing Commander III all had their best versions released on the 3DO system over any of the other consoles. Not to say that there were not big time dissapointments fior the 3DO either as DOOM helped to undermine the systems power due to it's excessively poor conversion and the fact that the highly anticipated Water World never saw the light of day on the system also helped to bog it down also.
In the end the 3DO company sold the rights to the sequel system called the M2 to Matsushita in 1996 and stopped manufacturing games for it's own system, becoming a 3rd party software developer until the full demise fo the company in 2003 due to poor software titles that were boring and non creative.
The company did leave a fairly large fingerprint on the gaming community though as it was the first console to use CD's exclusively as it's media for games. It really did alot better than people believe as well and might have continued to gain momentum if not for the release of the Playstation and the Sega Saturn. In the end, of the three major players at the time; 3DO, Jaguar, and CD-i, the 3DO enjoyed the most successful and productive run at the time. |
