RETRO-spective: 3DO Interactive Multiplayer

The 3D0 REAL interactive Multiplayer was a piece of technology that was way ahead of its time but also arrived dead on arrival.

Let me explain.

The 3DO Company lacked the resources or experience in manufacturing their console, so they licensed the design for other companies to manufacture. This meant that the price of the console had to be very high (initially 700 US dollars high) so that the company that makes the thing could actually turn a profit on the console. This went against standard practice, where the console is sold at a loss, to entice players into the ecosystem, but once they are in, you can make your money on the media. To put that into perspective, 700 USD was roughly 1400 USD today. That is 2 to 3 times what a modern console would set you back. The 3DO had no track record of success, of any kind. How many people are going to bet the farm, when a travelling salesman comes through town? Sure, some people will, but not many (and quite rightly so).

The only game you could play for months was Crash and Burn.

The new Sony Playstation hit the shelves in time for Christmas 94 at the price of 299 dollars (less than half the cost of a 3DO). It blew the Saturn out of the water, by being 100 dollars cheaper at launch (400 cheaper than the 3DO’s RRP). Sony could do a lot of the manufacturing in-house and therefore had far greater cost control than Sega or 3DO. They also had the resources to potentially take a big initial financial loss, to get the console in player’s hands, get loads of developers working on games, to make the money back over time. It was not (and is not) a fair playing field. The 3DO was a disruptor. It wanted to throw the chess board in the air, let the pieces fall and reshape the very board itself. Sony wanted to torpedo the competition and have all the chess pieces for themselves. White pieces? Black pieces? All mine now.

Looking at the Playstation games available on launch, they are actually very underwhelming, except that Europe had Wipeout. It also had a mediocre fighting game in Toshinden, but this was all enough to convince gamers that the future, in Christmas 1994 had arrived. For 299 USD. The Playstation had lifted off and never looked back. 3DO and Jaguar were still around at this point, but they were not the future. They were already the past. The never was.

I recently picked up a Panasonic FZ-10 model, with the famous VCD attachment. Road Rash, Starblade, Draxon’s Revenge (not very good) and Dragonslore (doesn’t work, it turns out) and one of the rare, 6 button controllers. Prices on eBay are what I would describe as ridiculous, so I have found some 650Mb CDs for sale, and I am going to have a crack at burning some games (famously tricky for the 3DO). Rather sweetly, my box for Draxon’s revenge includes some lovingly handwritten notes on how to play the game, plus a very old photo of a dog.

The 3DO name (which I still love) was derived as follows.

• Audio
• Vido
• 3DO

Yes, it is lame. But I still love it. The original model of 3DO was the FZ-1 from Panasonic. This still looks like a premium piece of kit today.

The 3DO was not only a powerful games console, but, like the Philips CD-I (not a powerful games console) was going to be the central hub of family entertainment. You could hook the 3DO up to a TV and a HIFI and the 3DO was going to be the centre of the living room. This was exactly what modern consoles do today, but the market is ready for this now, and we have fibre optic broadband, streaming and SSD hard drives to make it happen.

Because the cost was already so high, if you wanted to watch a video CD movie, you had to buy an expensive attachment (on top of your already eye wateringly expensive console). 3DO Company should “do the Math” as none of these sums added up to consumers.

The 3DO, Jaguar, CD-I and CD32 occupied this fascinating “window of opportunity” between the incredible 16-bit consoles, that were having a late summer and the PlayStation. Developers had found their stride with the SNES and Megadrive and were getting incredible things out of the ageing hardware. This definitely hurt the new consoles. Why drop 300 dollars to play Cybermorph, when you can drop 50 bucks to play Starfox? The new wave of consoles were powerful, but developers were new to them, and it is perfectly normal for the early titles of a console to not reflect their true power. For me, this was a key to their failure.

You need to convince gamers of your vision of the future. They need to see the new games running and realise this is a meaningful step up in experience from the last generation (this is why I still have whatever the old Xbox is called and not whatever the new one is called). The natural thing to do, as the consumer, if you are not instantly convinced about a console, is to “wait and see”.The Jaguar or CD-32 spectacularly failed there, by having relatively weak launch lineups. If you don’t get enough early console momentum, if too many of your possible customers “wait and see,” then you don’t get enough good devs working on good games, and suddenly you have lost your lustre as a new and exciting product and quickly you are a dead duck. At 700 USD, you can bet that many possible 3DO customers were waiting to see. Particularly if there is only one game to play.

Jaguar, CD-I and 3DO have all been historically lumped in the same bucket of failure, but really there was a huge difference in how they performed. The CD-I was really a multimedia player, with games added as an afterthought, so I will leave that here, but Jaguar and 3DO were genuinely both very powerful for their time. The Jaguar had manufacturing issues that meant most orders for their first Christmas were cancelled, and the people willing to overlook Atari’s toxic brand were badly burned for Christmas. The Jaguar’s lifetime sales were slightly north of 100,000 units. The 3DO sold something like 2.1 Million units. A failure, yes, but not the catastrophic failure of the Jaguar.

The 3DO Company was set up by the founder of EA (before they were evil) and envisioned a bold VHS-style gaming future (we might laugh now, but trust me, no one was laughing at the time). Costs to develop games on the 3DO were very low, and he was enraged, when EA started producing games on the Playstation and Saturn, in what he (rightly) saw as a personal betrayal. He was trying to flip the balance of power in the industry, in their favour, and they were jumping into bed with the enemy. Surely, a slightly higher licensing fee could have meant some of the money could come back to Panasonic and Goldstar (now LG)? Surely there was a way to plug the hole in the Death Star? The fatal flaw in the 3DO business model? “What if, what if what if..?”

The Jaguar only managed 70 games, the 3DO about 250. Yes, there was a lot of shovelware on the 3DO. But there were some games that were genuinely fantastic. I still remember trying Road Rash in HMV on Southampton high street in the mid-90s. It was 5 minutes that stood out to me as one of the few times in my life that games genuinely felt like they had moved forward. The graphics were amazing, but the gameplay was also incredible. If 3DO or Jaguar had managed 2 games of such quality on launch (an impossible proposition) then gaming could be very different today. The Jaguar has about 5 games that were genuinely incredible experiences, that could stand up as “THIS IS THE FUTURE OF GAMES” (AVP, Tempest, Rayman, a great version of Doom) but they were too few, and came far too late. The 3DO had, in my opinion, more “decent” games but it also had a number of great games (Wing Commander(s), Star Control 2, Road Rash, FIFA, Madden, The Horde, Killing Time) but none of the really great titles made it to market quickly, as one might expect. The 3DO was powerful enough to enjoy a slew of Neo Geo fighters, and had one of the best versions of Street Fighter 2, for the time. There were never quite enough quality titles, on the release slate, things happened a bit slower than they needed to. Time was running out.

CD media was still relatively new and untested at the time, and all CD consoles were struggling with how to actually utilise this extra storage capacity (a 3DO disk was a whopping 650Mbs). Some games (e.g. Gates of Thunder on the PC Engine) made a great conventional game and added an incredible CD soundtrack (really cool) whereas a lot of other games used the space for video, and largely forgot about the gameplay experience of the “player – cum viewer” (a bad idea) that went a long way to (somewhat unfairly) tarnishing the new consoles in the eyes of the huge number of players who hung on to their 16-bit machines and kept an eye on what it would be like to be able to spend a thousand bucks, to get Mad Dog McCree running in their living room.

What the 3DO desperately needed, and sadly never got, were sequels to the existing popular games, FIFA or Madden 94, Need for Speed 2, where we could see iterative improvement on already good games. To show that the 3DO had more power to give, even better experiences. In short, a future.

The Playstations, Megadrives and SNESes of this world, have a long life, and they were profitable for developers, so you end up with a large number of the best game designers having a bit more time and working on hardware they are already experienced with. You are going to end up with a better game library (you will still have some stinkers, all consoles do), than the Jaguar, where devs use the 68000 chip to push something out quickly, rather than spending the time, energy and toil to really get the best out of the Tom and Jerry chips. The games industry is a brutal and unforgiving place. DO THE MATH.

Looking back, it is actually incredible that Trip Hawkins did what he did, and achieved so much with the 3DO, even if all these achievements were for naught. His aim was not to create a successful games console but to completely reshape the way that people consume and enjoy media. Something we enjoy today with the Xbox and PlayStation.