Nice video. I picked up my FZ-1 in early 1995 just before the Saturn came out. I loved it, with Road Rash and Need for Speed still being favorites. My buddy Dan and I played Twisted all the time after school... but at the end of the year when i had a Saturn and a PS1 in my room, the 3DO started to get played less and less, unfortunately. I still have mine now, after i gave it to Dan over 20 years ago but just got it back recently after he passed away. I miss him so i boot up the machine once in a while to remember him... This system really was special for a lil while there!
Same. Also got the 3DO at launch and was blown away playing Need for Speed and Road Rash. In hindsight, I regret getting rid of my 3DO and the Dreamcast. Now I just play on PC.
My uncle was literally the only person I knew who had a 3DO. He told me years later about how his buddies laughed a him for wasting his money. He also bought a Playstation when they were first released in the US in late 1995. Everybody thought he made the same mistake again, but that console proved to be a success.
Great summary. Got a used FZ-10 for around $130 in about 1996. Calling the Saturn a failure in a 3DO video is an interesting choice -- It was Sega's most successful console in Japan and had a long life.
The Saturn did well in its domestic market, but failed internationally when compared to the N64 and PlayStation. The games industry was shifting towards the new frontier of 3D at the time, and the Saturn was a machine built primarily for 2D games. The PS1 also had the edge of being a far less complicated machine to develop for: you only had to wrangle one main processor and one graphics chip, as opposed to the Saturn’s two CPUs and three GPU chips. On top of the Saturn being much harder to develop for, Sega was also much stingier about how they handled both development resources & game licensing compared to Sony. Sony was not afraid to give out development libraries for the console that were competent and took advantage of the hardware’s features, whereas Sega internally struggled to even give access to their best libraries *to first-party developers.* Unlike most countries, Japan stuck with the idea of 2D games for longer than the rest of the world due to motion sickness issues. Japan’s arcade market was also still going strong at the time, which benefited a lot of games that ended up getting ported to the Saturn: the PlayStation had a bigger emphasis on longer-form games. In summary: both development reasons and cultural reasons were responsible for the Saturn’s failure internationally
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 Another factor was that the Saturn was very expensive to make. Sega touted a total of eight processors in the Saturn in their advertising. The problem, however, was that these were discrete processors whereas the PlayStation relied on integration, incorporating multiple processors into fewer large scale custom ICs. It also helped that Sony had their own resources to design and make chips to a degree that Sega didn't have. And Sony kept revising the PlayStation, incorporating more functions into fewer chips, simplifying the board design as well as the console's construction, leading to reduced manufacturing costs. On the other hand, Sega was stuck with a complex design and expensive manufacturing of the Saturn, even after design revisions, because the board still had to accommodate eight separate processors. So every time Sony lowered the price of the PlayStation on account of their reduced production costs, Sega was forced to follow suit to stay competitive, losing more money for each Saturn they sold.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581if Sega had provided better developer resources, kept the September 2 launch and gotten a real Sonic game out I bet the Saturn would have sold double its units. It definitely was a 2D powerhouse but it could hold its own in 3D, with some magic it can even be better than the PlayStation and N64 with the right tools
The surprise Saturn launch in the US backfired in their face while also the original Playstation debuting at $299. $100 cheaper. By 1997 the Playstation was only $150 and was overtaking everything.
The Saturn was significantly more expensive to produce than the Playstation, both thanks to its complex design and Sony's vertical integration. Sony didn't need to buy disc drives and chips from other companies, they could just make them themselves. Sony also had other, large industries it could fall back on, like movies and music, which made hardware price cuts much easier to swallow. Because Sega was losing so much money per unit sold, their bean counters decided to just sell fewer consoles, which positively affected losses but made the system less visible to consumers and harder to buy. Not the best strategy when your goal is to make up for hardware losses with more software sales. They also crippled themselves by abruptly dropping support for the Genesis, which was still selling strong in 1995, as 16-bit titles still made up the majority of sales that year. That would have been an easy source of revenue that could have helped them cope with Saturn losses.
Wow many many years ago I was helping a friend pack some things from his home in CA. When I spotted this weird console among some the items he wanted pack for the move. When I asked about it he told me that it had been the first disk based console and that his dad had bought it for him as a Xmas present. I’m of course me having grown up in a more conventional (poor) family had never heard of this console before. He also told me that it kind of sucked and had not liked much. However when the original Xbox launched his dad had also bought him an Xbox on launch day along with every single game that it launched with. Best time of my life when we spent 12 hours beating Halo in one sitting. Ryan if you’re out there thanks for the best memories of my entire youth.
Growing up, my friend got one when it came out. We were probably too young to really enjoy the system, but I remember not really liking any of the games he had which was probably most if not all of them. We quickly went back to a steady diet of Nintendo and Sega with games like Super Mario Kart and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 which have clearly stood the test of time. The 3DO mostly just lived on the shelf, and while he got more games for it as they came out, we rarely if ever touched them. At the end of the day, I really think that the one thing that really matters for gaming system is the game library. Without games, no amount of technology advancement and innovation will save a system.
The 90's were wild concerning electronics and gaming. As a 13-year old in 1993 I loved all the different systems trying to compete. Not that I owned all of them (came from an Atari 800XL, C64, NES, SNES, Megadrive), but played various systems at friend's houses. The sheer amount of tech evolving was fantastic. Not only the expensive 3DO, but also the Neo Geo line of products. The jump up from each generation was interesting and made me love tech in general.
Hey, another old-timer like me, same age as I was back then! That really was a great and revolutionary time for gaming, crazy stuff was being tried, system wars were in full swing, and bits were everything. Kids today don't know how nuts it was to be a kid back then.
hey i was 13 back then too. you are not wrong it was a wild time. It seemed like every week there was something new and high tech coming out and evolving at such a rapid rate. I went from Atari 2600, C64 Atari ST in the 80's to Megadrive, PS1 in the 90's. What a trip
Exactly. The number of systems was extremely frustrating and exciting at the same time. If you had been a millionaire, affording all of them would've been an amazing blast. But most of us could only afford one every five years which often meant leaping over entire generations of consoles/computer systems -- for better and for worse.
Star Control 2 on the 3DO changed how I looked at games. Also had Twisted, Road Rash(good soundtrack), and Madden(loved the team previews). Cost way too much, I saved almost a year for one. Glad I did
I remember seeing this system in Software etc and being completely blown away. I remember seeing the $700 price tag and being sad about it. $700 is a lot today. in 1993, it felt unobtainable.
In 1993 about six months after it came out, I actually won a 3DO in a contest. I live in Pennsylvania now but at the time as a child, I was 12 years old and my grandfather took me to a GameStop or game exchange. I think it was called at the time and I exchange the video game for another one and the clerk told me that they had a contest to win one. I am typically an unfortunate person I feel like, however, I filled it out. Drop my slip in the box and to my surprise, about six weeks later, they reached out and told me that I won it for free. I picked it up, and I loved the game crash and burned, although it was difficult to advance in. The graphics were incredible. They have video cut scenes in the games which were unheard of. Eventually, I want to say that I picked up a disc that had a game on it with several samples a video games. Maybe even that CD came with the console as well. Obviously, as you said not much came out after it and I was a child is not as if I could afford to buy anything myself. I kept the console for many years after I’ll probably didn’t get rid of it until I was about 20 years old. I just kept it almost as a novelty. I tried to tell some people about it and most people don’t even remember that it existed. So I had to click on this video because it took me back. My name is David Dailey
Dear Dave, thank you for your emotional story, I can really feel with you! When I was young I attended secondary school in central Europe. My parents were poor and I never could afford any video consoles in the 90ies. I used to go to a video game store after school. There I could play sometimes 3DO games on a demo console. I remember having played Need for Speed as well as Crash'n Burn. Sometimes the shop owner told us children that we would have to leave the shop if we didn't buy anything. It was annoying, but I came back every week again. I felt some kind of envy to those people who could afford a 3DO console in those days. It cost more than 1000 DM. This is the reason why today I possess as a collector all 4 different 3DO consoles: Panasonic FZ1, FZ10, Goldstar and Sanyo.
I ordered an FZ-1 from the Sears catalog in 1994 when I was 14 years old with money I saved from my paper route at the time. I wanna say it was $400 at the time and came with Crash & Burn and Jurassic Park Interactive. I was the coolest kid in my class because of it lol. I loved it. Some great gems like the two Wing Commander games, Star Fighter, Quarantine, Star Control 2, Immercenary, the list goes on and on. I ended up owning over 100 titles due to a video rental store near me going out of business. The owner rented out 3DO titles and I was one of the only people in town that rented them out. As the store was closing, he offered to sell me 60 or so titles for $50 which I jumped on.
I was probably 12 or 13 when Mom sent was to a Disney vacation from Brazil, each one of the brothers with a very limited budget to just survive the trip for a little over a week or so. However, I have always being a believer and had great expectations in the industry. Decided to "invest" all of my finance on a Goldstar console, along with a copy of Samurai Showdown that up until today, after watching your video, never fully understood why that guy was so nice to give a copy of that game to me, only to bring the console back to our hotel room, and start an argument with my older brothers over who was going to pay for my food, throughout those remaining days of our vacation. - money well spent my man, always lock on your dreams to make it a reality. Anything is possible, and this was one of my American Dreams. God Bless America
I remember a neighbor got a 3DO. The only things I really remember was this 'game' that as you pressed buttons and the control pad, it would put in different colors as it turned and blended. And they had an episode of '2 stupid dogs' 😂
In 1993, games to me went from Super Mario World and Sonic 2, to StarFox showing off 3D on SNES, to 3DO saying "hold my beer" and just dropping into the chat with Crash 'n Burn. I absolutely immediately had a need for that console. I didn't get one straight away, but after the price drop, I was able to get an FZ-1 with Super Street Fighter II Turbo and ordered two Capcom Soldier pads for it. I still play that game, as well as many others for the console. It may not have fared well on the market, but it has a pretty decent library. If anything, I was a little mad that Saturn and PS1 weren't dramatically better despite coming out a comfortable amount of time later.
I have a 3D0. I got it from a friend who worked at a game store and they were let know not to expect a last paycheck. So they took games and systems. My friend gave me the 3D0. I loved it and owned a Playstation as well. The 3D0 was a poor man's gaming pc, allowing you to play lots of CD ROM titles.
I've had many hours and hours of fun playing this system. Began collecting when the games were tossed into the bargin bins. I've got some rare peripheals and several versions of the console. My pride of the collection is a SANYO T.R.Y. with a NMEMO usb drive emulator installed. Star Control II took 10 years of exploration and coordinate note taking to finally save the galaxie from the Urquan.
Yes, I bought one a few months after it was released at Serramonte Center in Daily City, CA for $699. I picked up the 3DO console along with the pack in game Crash 'n Burn, Waialae Country Club and Total Eclipse. I took it over to my dad's house in San Francisco so we could play Waialae Golf. My dad wasn't a gamer, but was amazed at the realisim of the course. The 3DO actually has a lot of great games. SFII Turbo, Road Rash, John Madden Football, FIFA, Doom, Rebel Assault, Mad Dog McCree, PGA Tour Golf, and Wing Commander were the best versions at the time on any console.
My father bought our 3DO across the way at good guys electronics in Daly City. I remember it looked very realistic and we picked up road rash and escape from monster manor. It was an amazing system.
Bought a brand new Goldstar 3DO at EB games for $79.99 in the late 90's. I think it came with Sewer Shark, and I had a bough quite a few other games like Killing Time, Need for Speed, Hell, Quarantine, Wolfenstein 3D and D. I wish D would come to Steam like Killing Time.
A small percentage of millennial kids had the Panasonic 3DO and the Phillips CD-i. Why? Because they were so damn expensive when they were released!. My friend had the CD-i and I loved playing Dragon's Lair and Space Ace on it.
Seeing the demos of this thing in stores back in 1993 was bananas, even the computers didnt have anything that looked as good. The console may have been a commercial failure, but it was cutting edge technology when it came out, nothing could touch it for years. Maybe if 3do had pockets as deep as microsoft or sony, they could have sold it at a lost and established a proper market share, make up the profits down the road like Sony did with the ps3, but it was obvious with its $699 CAD price tag, only the rich or extremely dedicated would be able to own one.
I got mine during the Christmas of 1994 for $400. At the time it was miles ahead of anything else that was out. Games like shockwave and Madden 94 blew my friend's mines. It always puzzled me why they never showed commercials for games on the system.
I played "Way of the Warrior" at the demo kiosk in Media Play and remember being blown away by the audio quality. $700 was just out of the question though.
Got Burgled and lost my Amiga A1200, Commodore were going bust so an A1200 was out of the question. Saw Edge Magazine with Ridge Racer on the cover which I had just played in the arcades so wondered what that was about. Read all about Playstation, but in the center review section was a game called Road Rash on 3DO which got 9/10. I had to have it. This was around September 1994. Went to a small shop in my town who were getting 1 unit in and it was going to a customer. I convinced the shop to sell it to me instead. I didn't get Road rash with it I got Total Eclipse as I had a UK PAL unit. For 3 months I played Fifa/Road Rash/Total Eclipse and Shock Wave.. I swapped my PAL unit for an NTSC 3DO and by Dec 94 got a Playstation from Japan. At the time I also had a Neo Geo CDZ. A year later I bought a Saturn and a year after that an N64. By then 3DO was boxed up and not much used. I still have it, the NTSC model is still in my collection from 1994. The 3DO is the reason I met someone in the games industry, because the shop I bought my 3DO was owned by Dave Cox, who went on to be a creative lead in Castlvania on PS3/360. Due to my commitment of big spending in his shop he put me in the special thanks section of the credits of his games.
I bought one in 1994 for $699 after breaking up with my girlfriend at the time. I was poor at the time but needed something to help out. I put it on the credit card and eventually paid it off. 30 years later I still have it and it still plays most of the original cds I bought for it. Pretty crazy.
When I was a stupid and gullible 13-year-old kid, the ads for 3DO in GamePro magazine, along with the system previews, totally sold me on it. My mother actually bought me the FZ-1 model for full sticker price of $700 for Christmas 1993, which still amazes me to this day. It was a great system at the time, and I was blown away by how real everything looked and sounded back then on it. Road Rash, Star Control II, Twisted, D, Crash n' Burn... all great games for the 3DO that I fondly remember. Yes the system was expensive as hell but as long as you had the cash to burn, it was worth it... for a time at least. Until the PlayStation came along.
@@jameswatson5807 yes, its another time right now. When parents buy stuff for their kids (or themselves) by taking loans or paying in installments. Expansive stuff for hundreds of dollars. That never happened in the 90's.
I saw Total eclipse in a department store, me and my friend were amazed by the graphics. We decided to split half and half to buy it.. but for some reason I ended up with it lol. No clue how that happened. Crash and burn was very good, Road rash. I liked way of the warrior because Ive never heard rock music in video games before. Definitely a much better system than Jaguar.
I never had a 3do when it was new. Unfortunately, being a 1st grader at the time produced no income. However, not long before it was discontinued, the local video game store put there display model and a bunch of games on sale for $30 and I was able to get it. It was amazing to me at the time. I ended up getting a PS1 and it was played sparingly. I still have it, it's the Goldstar version. Games I remember most are Need for Speed, Doom, and Alone in the Dark.
I was lucky as a teenager, my older brother bought a 3DO and we really loved it. Star Control II, the 3DO-specific version of Road Rash, the definitive version of Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition, Return Fire, so many great games. Obviously the system had its issues, but I will always look back on this system so fondly. Cheers for the video!
When I was in elementary school and they announced the 3DO was going to be $700 I knew it would fail before it released. $700 for a game console in 1993 was madness
In 1995, people paid 1000-2000€ for the launch of the Playstation. I remember that in 2000 we paid 900DM (680€) for the PS2 with 1 game 🥺 Today people will cry if the price is not below 399 directly at launch 🤦🏼♂️
The ONLY THING that REALLY DESTROYED the 3DO , was that it was TOO DA*N EXPENSIVE 😂. The Neo-Geo was $500 bucks, the controller $300, and games $100. And to think that there was MORE EXPENSIVE HARDWARE actually sitting on the shelf😂...just ludicrous
I already has a SNES at the time if I recall, and this was one of those rare weekends that Dad splurged - albeit at the video rental store. So I got to try it for a few days, or maybe it was a week. The only game, perhaps the only one we rented (which seems odd, maybe the other games were bad) was Quarantine. It was pretty cool. I remember being enamored with the design of the 3DO (Panasonic version). But then we returned the system and I got an N64 for a Christmas soon thereafter.
My best friend got one for Xmas the year it launched. $700 We knew about it but only because of Night Trap, that was the only thing people talked about & after we got it, it was very underwhelming. Was just a movie you watched and pressed a few buttons to switch cameras etc. Instead of porting all the “hot” games at the time they created their own and they all were shit games….at least they were at launch. Was like a $700 generic gaming console. Video brought me back! Enjoyed video!
My friend's bother bought an FZ-1 in mid-1994, for $400. Even back then, there was a LOT of talk about the M2 add-on, which is one of the reasons he decided to buy it. He had a decent amount of games for it, including Road Rash, Need For Speed, Madden '94, Slam N Jam, Gex, and quite a few others. The second half of 1994 was a pretty good year for the system, because if you had those games, you weren't really lacking for enjoyment and the system really did feel like a big leap over the SNES. The Playstation and Saturn were still over a year away (at least the Saturn WAS, until the surprise launch at E3 which was a terrible mistake), and the 3DO looked poised to compete relatively well with the early titles on those machines. Unfortunately, what seemingly nobody expected is how strong the 16-bit market remained, with 16-bit titles still making up the majority of sales even through the end of 1995. Sega prematurely ended support for the Genesis, which did little more than deny themselves extra revenue that could have helped make up for losses with the Saturn. Meanwhile, Nintendo had no choice but to continue strong support for the SNES thanks to the many delays of the N64, which led to some of its best games being released. As much as I love Gex, games like Donkey Kong Country really managed to narrow the gap, if not eliminate it altogether, thanks to quality programming and outstanding artwork. Nintendo just had a larger, better group of third-party developers for the SNES than 3DO could compete with, and the cutthroat nature of the industry meant it would only be a matter of time before they ran out of money to keep the platform going. While working on the M2 hardware, which eventually got sold to Matsushita for $100 million, 3DO's hardware group were also working on its successor, often called "MX." In 1997, 3DO sold their hardware business to Samsung for $20 million, and it became known as CagEnt, who had entered talks with Nintendo to license the MX technology in the Gamecube. This deal fell apart, apparently because Nintendo wanted to buy CagEnt outright and Samsung couldn't reach an agreement on the terms of the sale. Nintendo ended up working with ArtX instead for the Gamecube, and eventually CagEnt was sold to Microsoft, who turned it into their WebTV division, the same division that would be enlisted to create a competing design to the startup Xbox team within Microsoft. The WebTV team supposedly designed a more multimedia-focused machine, which eventually lost out to the PC hardware-based, game-focused machine the Xbox team came up with. However, the WebTV team's influence would return with the design of the Xbox 360 (and later Xbox One). So 3DO's influence on the industry was pretty dramatic, even long after the company exited the console business.
NGL,I got the 3DO when it dropped to $150, had the OG Panasonic model, and I LOVED it. Gex was a blast, I loved Crash N Burn, Road Rash was brilliant, and I loved & hated Way of the Warrior and Guardian War. But I genuinely enjoyed Lucianne's quest. May not have been the best RPG by far, but it was enjoyable. Wish the system would have had more games, but I enjoyed what i played. And OMG I still love the stupid insanity of the game show game Twisted! The characters you could play as were so hysterically B movie, but still so much fun. Ahhh memories 💖
I was 16 when the 3DO came out. A friend of mine had one and after getting hooked playing Crash and Burn for hours, I convinced my father to go half and half with me to buy our own. It also came with a demo disc that had a 2 Stupid Dogs cartoon that was pretty funny. My favorite games: Way of the Warrior which used White Zombie's La Sexorcisto album as the soundtrack; Jurassic Park which had one of the earliest and most effective jump scares in the building levels with the raptors hunting you; Dragon's Lair which looked great. A few years ago, I finally reacquired my old 3D0 which had somehow fallen into the hands of my sister, and it sort of launched my console repair side hustle. It remains one of the fondest memories I have of my father.
There was a game for this called (I think) Trip'd. In my hometown there was a solely video game rental store and he had everything. My friend and I were in there all the time and we knew the owner really well, so when this game came out we would have late night sessions playing this game (we also played a bunch of Super Bomberman). I never got one myself because they WERE expensive, but I also didn't understand what was going on with the multiple units. Goldstar was the company that made really cheap VCRs, and I never wanted to drop money on anything with the Goldstar name after I got burned by one of their VCRs that ate itself rather quickly (and a few of my movies, as I recall). The Panasonic one seemed better built but I just never had the money for one.
It failed just like the Neo Geo did. The launch price. I was one of the dumb people who bought the 3DO at launch. I was the only one I knew that actually owned one. It was too late by time they launched the cheaper top loader versions to save it. The 3DO was what made me stop buying electronics when they first launched. At least until the Dreamcast launched anyway.
Fun fact: the 3DO is one of the very few game consoles that doesn't have ANY copy protection measures. Anyone could make 3DO games and sell them without permission. I'm pretty sure you can just burn game ISOs to discs with computers and have them work in the system with no effort.
It's true they don't. But the systems are very finicky about what discs they will and won't read. You may have heard about Limited Run doing a 3DO game not too long ago where they used burned discs and a lot of 3DO owners couldn't get them to work. My 3DO will happily read any pressed CD all day long but the second it gets a burned disc it has a fit and won't read it no matter what manufacturer, burner, or burn speed used. A lot of the systems are like mine, where others will read some discs from certain manufacturers. It's a roll of the dice.
Yea my FZ-10 will only read a handful of burned games. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the type of disc. I really think it has to do with burn speed. 10x is the lowest mine goes. And you have to burn these at a very low speed.
I remember there was a Panasonic 3DO setup at Sears. It had some golf game to try out. The graphics seemed pretty good, but I'm sure the price kept it from being a serious possibility. Good video.
I wasn’t willing to drop that kind of cash on a system back then. And if I did want to it would have been on a NeoGeo and not a 3DO. Of course, the NeoGeo had the additional complication of the games also being very expensive. But, man, what a system. NeoGeo games still look great and are fun to play today. The 3DO? Not so much.
I had the Goldstar 3DO. I remember the controls being quirky and somewhat difficult. The live action movie clips in the games were cool but I remember the video quality being grainy. Not many games were actually fun to play because they were essentially movies with limited user interaction. I would press a few buttons then have to wait for a long movie clip to play before being able to resume. It essentially felt more like selecting scenarios followed by watching a series of movie clips that could not be skipped. Overall, I agree the idea of the 3DO at the time was admirable but the gameplay was poor. I quickly moved on to the PlayStation and never looked back. My 3DO was retired to a shelf in my closet for a few years and eventually traded at my local game store for store credit.
The FZ-10 looks so cool. Its a shame 3DO and its licencees were insistent on pricing the console at $699.(absolutely insane even reading that.) Im gonna armchair strategize and say that, they should've pegged it at $349. That way it could've got a leg up on Sega at the very least. What could've been. On the bright side, Gex was the All-star for that system. In hindsight, they also shouldve had more exclusivity deals with studios like Crystal Dynamics. Imagine Tomb Raider for the 3DO, and Gex being a console mascot.
I can still recall earlier like back in '96 or '97 when all of the 3DO games listed in those magazine mail order catalogues were going for DIRT-CHEAP... Like around only 3 to 5 bucks per game. I knew that wasn't a very good sign for the system.
I had a 3DO. I won a Virtual Boy in a holiday contest, and... it was absolutely awful. At the time the 3DO and Virtual Boy (at least the edition I had won) were the same price at the store I won from and they were kind enough to let me return the VB and swap it for the 3DO. I loved my 3DO back then. Star Control 2, Gex, and Wing Commander were some of my favorite games of all time.
The 3DO had a lot going for it, but it was killed by unfortunate timing, and the fact that its business model and its hardware were incompatible. Either one could have reached market success, but not both together. If the business model had been paired up with innovative but cheap hardware (like the Nintendo Wii), it could've been hugely successful. If a traditional game hardware company with deep pockets, first party developers, and hefty royalties for third parties had brought the 3DO hardware to the market at a reasonable price (losing money on the hardware), it also could have succeeded (or been more successful). Hindsight is 20/20, but what I would've done in Trip Hawkins' shoes is make the game royalties higher (while still lower than Nintendo and Sega), then start a bidding war between hardware manufacturers for 1 year of manufacturing exclusivity if they'd sell it at a loss, and split the game royalties with them until they recouped their losses. The console launches at a better price and finds a bigger install base, the exclusive hardware manufacturer recoups losses from game royalties and gets to be synonymous with the 3DO brand for the first year of its life, and future hardware manufacturers are entering the market once economies of scale for the custom chips and other components have brought the manufacturing price down to more reasonable levels. I don't think this would have made the 3DO a real competitor against the PS1, Saturn, and N64, but I think it could have sold much better and carved out a bigger niche for itself. Ultimately it came to market as a bleeding-edge device at a time where hardware was improving at breakneck speeds and rapidly becoming more affordable. The high price prevented it from finding a market, and competitors were able to render it obsolete with cheaper hardware a couple years after it launched. Sort of a shame as it never reached its potential. Homebrew projects like the Tomb Raider port and Mortal Kombat II port show that developers could have gotten more out of the system.
It was the price that killed it as much as the competition and lack of software. Everyone already had a snes or Genesis, and a few of us had already tried a neo geo or turbographix 16, so that much $$$ when new models of existing hardware were already on the Horizon just didn't make sense. The only kids i knew with 3dos had $3000 pcs too and parents who spent money on gaming for themselves which were rare at the time.
I got a 3DO for my 13th birthday, about a month after launch. But that wasn't the original plan. I actually wanted and got an Atari Jaguar, which launched in November, so we delayed my birthday gift a little bit. I got the Jaguar home and it was DOA. Took it back to Software Etc (there's another throwback store) and they didn't have another Jaguar and no idea when it would be available. So as I looked around I saw the 3DO and started looking at it and the games. It was obviously A LOT more money, but my dad saw I was disappointed and offered to get the 3DO instead. The rest is history. I still have it, but I don't use it, because I have a Japanese 3DO now as well with the 240p mode switch. My favorite games for it are Return Fire, Space Hulk, Twisted, Way of the Warrior, Need for Speed, Madden, and Slam N Jam. I had a lot of fun with it and still do today. In the end, the 3DO was a failure, BUT not as big of a failure as the Jaguar was. At least I have 10-15 games I enjoy playing on it, vs 2-3 on the Jaguar. :)
Correction, the Saturn did NOT come out in North America in Nov 1994, it was May of 1995 ahead of it's planned fall 1995 launch date which caused several retailers to boycott selling the device all together.
His mentality was way ahead of its time. We started to see multimedia gaming consoles till the 2000s with the xbox and ps2 with dvd players, music players, online gaming, then the following generation even had online apps with their consoles. He was trying to do this one and all device in 1993.
I bought my 3DO system used at a Bazaar for $180 in early 1995. I bought the ten games they were selling with it for $60. The system wasn't so much ahead of its time, but right at the point when it could be compared to everything else coming out. It couldn't compete with the good will Sega still had with the Genesis, Nintendo's "legend" status, and Sony's genius marketing and stable product. By the time I got my 3DO, it was a curious also-ran. Same with Jaguar, which I also owned at one point that same year. I settled on a Saturn in 96, then cruised with PSX through the late-90s, dabbling in N64.
A friend of mine got one for Christmas. It seemed impressive at the time. I was gaming on a 486 SX-33 at the time and I remember being excited at the prospect of buying a 3D0 card for it. I also briefly wanted the Jaguar for Alien vs Predator. I am thankful that I did not buy either of those things.
My older brother had this in the 90s, I was 6 or 7 I think. We loved it! My favorite games to play were Gex, Road Rashh, Mega Race, Espape from Monster Manor, Crash and Burn, and Dragons lair.
I remember seeing a TV show playing Need for Speed, and thinking it looked better than what was even in the arcades at the time. But it was just too darn expensive. and by the time they caught on to this, the PS1 and the Saturn were out.
@@fightkostka I worked in an EB Games just before the PS1 came out, and we had a ton of unsold 3DO stock on an entire isle of the store. We even had to put up a new advertising campaign for them stating, "Don't Buy a Dodo, Buy 3DO", we had great fun covering over the "Don't" part :P
In 1994, my dad worked at Panasonic (he assembled t.v.s) and with his income tax return, he took us to Best Buy and bought the FZ-1 model 3DO, an extra controller , Road Rash, A game called Flying Nightmares, and another space shooter named Shockwave (I remember the opening scene with a “News” report and aliens) My older brother, working at TGIFridays, took some of his paycheck and bought Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers (I whooped him with my favorite, Chun Li), AD&D: Slayer, and Brain Dead 13. Over the next year, he would buy other games like Monster Manor, Alone in the Dark (that game actually terrified me lol), The Horde (little red creatures ate cows and said “Mmm numnum!” I thought it was adorable!) Guardian War, Space Hulk (another that terrified me), Psychic Detective and many more (Thanks to my brother for remembering all these games!)
I picked up an FZ-1 earlier this year in bad shape and haven't gotten around to it. I first ran into the system when myself and a cousin found one at a garage sale in early 99. We had a blast with it.
I remember the 3DO launch. We probably could have afforded to buy one but didn’t. PC gaming was really coming on in this time. It had all the same things. If you could afford this console you could probably afford a PC. Couple that with many of the 3DO games being PC ports and the lack of a “killer app” and you have no compelling reason to go to it. Man I remember the FMV days. I thought it was so cool at the time. I remembering getting Wing Commander 4 and being stunned by the amount of game disks. No way I was going to be copying that to a hard drive.
I loved my 3DO FZ-10. I bought it when I was about 12 years old with money I saved up. Maddog McCree I & II were great fun with the orange gun. I also spent a lot of time on the original Need for Speed. I was amazed by the sound that they recorded from real cars. This was unique to the 3DO as I recall.
Appreciate the work you did to research and make this video. I had a love/hate with the 3DO day one. I never had one, but one of my gamer friends did. I was a hardcore Street Fighter II player, learning the game in the arcades, bowling alley's, donut shops and pizza parlors. I lived and breathed that game for years playing it in it's first iteration and everyone following and spending God knows how many quarters over those few years. I was blown away with the Super Nintendo version back in those day. I actually imported a Super Famicom so I could buy SFII six months before it came out in America. ANYWAYS, years later the 3DO has Super Street Fighter II Turbo (X). It was ALMOST a perfect arcade translation and up and until that point ALL home console versions were inferior to the arcade versions. I would have sold my appendix to buy a 3DO JUST to play Super Street Fighter II Turbo except for one problem. The ground didn't move in Mode 7 like 3D imitation. Something that was glaringly missing from the 3DO port. Even the Super Nintendo had the cool Mode 7/3D imitation ground movement. Because of that I knew that 3DO was NOT the real deal and NOT worth it's price. If it could have nailed that game I would have found a way to buy it but nah. Dissapointing for that price and it couldn't even replicate my favorite arcade game's background (ground) animations. Fail.
Back in 1993/94 I had a good friend who bought the 3DO close to launch for its $600+ price tag. (We were 15 years old at the time, so there is no way he would be able to afford that himself. His dad bought it as a gift.) In short, we loved that dang thing! I have fun memories staying up all night with him playing road rash, super street fighter two, wing commander 3 (with Mark Hamill), Need for speed, Quarantine (a fun and gory taxi game), Gex, and so many of the other hidden gems that were on that system. Even after the PlayStation came out, we gave the 3DO lots of love. Road rash was a better game on the 3DO than on PSX, in my opinion. There were also a handful of decent light gun games that people don’t generally talk about for the 3DO. What also tanked the 3DO (aside from the price) was the shovelware that began to plague the system-mostly poor-quality FMV games. But some of those games, like Mad Dog McCree, we’re actually pretty fun for the time. Ultimately, I think you just had to be there in order to appreciate firsthand the gems that were on that system, and the fact that they were the first to market. Thanks for the vid!
I worked at 3DO...it was a pretty cool environment. Game designers had cubicle "apartments, their own fridges, and worked a lot. Trip was around the office a lot, and he was a real friendly guy.
I knew _one_ person with one of these. I never knew the family to have money. Five kids in a tiny house, and my friend's "bedroom" was literally a closet. An actual closet. Yet they had one of these.
The 3DO was based on a novel and pretty clever idea, but that idea was also its achilles heel. No one was going to spend $700 on a console in the early-mid 90s (translates to something like $1500 today) that had an extremely limited library. And publishers didn't build up that library because no one was buying it. It was stuck in a cycle of doom.
I worked at a pizzeria for my first job, at 16 yrs old. The first big purchase I ever made was a Panasonic 3DO. I loved Star Control, Return Fire, Way of the Warrior, Off World Interceptor , Demolition Man, and more.
In Computer Shopper magazine, an article stated that the 3DO would be open to independent devs with a very cheap fee to acquire an SDK. I've no idea what total cost was but it got me excited. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be but still got my 3DO. A friend who did dev for the machine gave me several machines (Mac ii, NeXT slab) and CDs used but none of the testing/debugging gear. Would be fun to dive into the HW as it was quite fun to work with, I've been told.
I worked at babbages at the time, a computer and console game store. I was hyped on the 3DO at the time as the saga CD and 32x weren’t very good and the snes and genesis just felt outdated. At its original price it was never sold. When we marked it down, I still don’t know if it was ever sold…except for the one I bought and the one I got my friend to buy. It was cool but as you said, the library was limited and it was hit or miss. FIFA was pretty awesome but I wasn’t a soccer fan, although I still remember being blown away by the sound in the game and I can still hear the crowd chanting and cheering. One of my favorite games at the time was road rash, great visuals, awesome sound track and what felt like at the time, a large playable world. The game I really wanted but ultimately never got was street fighter. It just came out way too late and the controller you needed wasn’t that great. By then the writing was on the wall and the impending launch of the Saturn, PlayStation, and n64, was what people were waiting for. The lesson from the failed 3DO is that you need a library of games to sell systems and you need a good amount of good quality games (which is why the Saturn failed and the PlayStation became king). Interesting side note: I still have that Panasonic 3DO and its original packaging and box and it looks as new as the day I bought it. The 32bit console wars was a great time to be a gamer and a tech nerd as we got to see first hand the game industry evolve and healthy competition create some truly amazing games.
The pic @12:31 REALLY threw me off for a second! I thought I was seeing thing and had to a double take lol....I was like why is there a Nintendo Switch box in pic from the early 90's?!? Is this evidence of some time-traveling gamer? Alas, it took about a few second later I came to more logical and boring conclusion, that is just a old display in shop or some lucky collector's stash. Man, what I wouldn't give to have old promotional store display like that in my collection...An old Nintendo SNES or 64 would be amazing, but I can only imagine what that would cost especially being something pretty rare, unique and a Ninetendo product(which like old Disney raises the price double, lol)! Hell I'd love to have one of the old Blockbuster display stands they used to have...I have so many memories of playing on those things back in the day whenever my family went to pick up a movie, and play all the new systems and used to beg to stay for just a little bit longer! Alas, I'll just have to admire from afar! I really wish there more museums or public collections, where you could go and look and play with all the old game stuff...So much that kind of stuff is the hands of private collectors never to see the light of day ever again. I mean, I get it, if I had the money & time, I would totally build a massive retro collection but at the same time, I really think that there really needs to a LOT more preservation and new alterative ways for everyone to view , learn, and experience all of it old computers & videogames. Just like we have public libraries and art museums...we're kinda getting there, but at the rate we're going so much is going to be lost and/or forgotten before we ever get to that point, and it's just so depressing and frustrating.
12:26 - in store kiosks were around before Nintendo; Atari and Intellivision did them in the 2nd gen, and Magnovox had the Odyssey on demo display in it's official Magnovox stores.
12:28 I remember playing the 3DO in 1993 at The Incredible Universe in Hilliard, Ohio!! 12:10 -- see this is the problem with the console -- they featured many titles such as Mortal Kombat which you showed there. MK was one of those games that was on many platforms, with varying quality. The 3DO version seemed nice, but comparable to the PC version. So it was like that with many games -- the 3D0 version DID blow away the same or similar titles on the Genesis or SNES. And we were anticipating the next gen Sega console (info was ambiguous at the time, so we didn't know WHAT that would be). I already had nice PCs. That was the ONE thing that Dad "spoiled" me with - multiple computers, both PC and multiple Macs. So I had a PC with things like Doom, etc.
I won a Goldstar 3DO, could never have afforded one. I remember the joy of poring over the review of Need For Speed in the UK 3DO Magazine in eager anticipation of its release, and then spending countless hours driving the three short tracks (did it again recently thanks to emulation). It was a great console, just let down by a lack of support. Mine is now in my cupboard and the games safely stored away. Happy times.
the first time i ever saw the 3do was at service merchandise. i wanted one but not at the price they were asking. i was in a gaming store at Biloxi Mississippi mall many years ago. a guy brought in a mess load of gaming stuff & he had both Goldstar 3do & a Panasonic FZ-10 & i started talking to him & i asked him how much for both the 3do & the Panasonic FZ-10. he sold both of them to me for $15 each. so, i bought them both right in front of the store owner & i still got both units today
The reasons the 3DO failed are too numerous to list, and it couldn't even compete with the SNES, which was 3 year older technology and had a lot of games that even looked better than the 3DO.
Hi. Great video. My first console ever was a SNES and when I was thinking of taking the next step, the 3DO was there. But it was too early for me too. Well, I was a kid and my parents weren't exactly rich but barely mid class. I was so fascinated by all that was advertised about the 3DO that I would've bought it the day before its launch. When my parents could finally afford a better console, the PSX had already made a name for itself. Cheaper and with great games. Nearly a decade later, thanks to the internet I discovered the ugly truth about the 3DO and how unknowingly lucky I was.
I had the Goldstar variant back in the early 90's. I absolutely loved the system and thought it would be the future. Road Rash, Return Fire, Killing Time and D were my favorite titles. Friends would come over daily to play the system. Such good memories.
I worked at EB games back in the early-mid 90s. Before I quit, I was able to score a new FZ-1 at a heavy discount as the 3DO was finishing its spiral down the drain. I bought a bunch of games for stupid cheap, too. I still have the 3DO but got rid of most of the games during our move back in 2003. Good thing I kept Road Rash, Star Control 2 & Immercenary - an underappreciated gem, IMO. The FZ-1 is an anvil & was built to last. I should open it up and check the capacitors, but it still fires up and plays original games and CD-R copies. Great console!
I bought my Panasonic 3DO around 1995 for $400. I remember playing a demo disk with a racing game that would just loop over and over, but it was cool. Madden looked frickin R E A L haha. I ended up selling it for maybe $100 dollars. I wish I still had it. There is an emulator called “4DO” that can run ROMs pretty well on PC these days.
I bought mine in college on release day. Put my self into debt with that one on my College CC. Favorite games are Star control 2 Space hulk and wing commander. I was the talk of the town in my dorm room since everyone was still rocking the NES. I still have my 3DO till this day. I fire it up once and a while to play starcontrol 2
The biggest flaw of the 3DO was its price. It had a decent game library , ut it could have been a lot better. Ultimately , he price of the console killed it, and by the time the price dropped, there were better consoles on the market.
It wasn't poor to terrible like the 32X or 'meh' like the Jaguar. It just didn't have classic franchise. It had a few like Super Street Fighter and Samurai Shodown.
I remember this infomercial they used to play for this on Comedy Central in the early morning in like '93-'94. Even as a kid I wasn't sold. It was like they were selling to grown ups who had no idea why people play video games. I preferred to have a Genesis, which would get a heck of a library. Same with the SNES. Even back then I thought FMV looked like crap. I think the 3DO was less ahead of its time than it was greedy. If a company included the very latest of computer hardware, it gets ridiculously expensive. How did they not see this coming?
Yes, I had the FZ-10 and I remember playing Street Fighter II, Road Rash, Need for Speed (Car and Driver's Need for Speed back then), and Samurai Shodown. The first system I bought when I got my first job. I believe it was over $500 and bought it at Babbage's at the local mall. The sales guy kept telling me to wait and save my money and wait for this system called the play station instead.
The main reason for the failure of the 3DO was it was too expensive and by the time it got released , it soon became outdated . Same with the ATARI Jaguar .
I finally got my FZ-1 cheap last year... and it's obvious the lack of quality of the software library really tanked it. There was no way it could have competed against the Saturn and PlayStation.
I bought a 3DO FZ-10 from best buy for $100 with Gex as the pack in title. The only way to find games at that point was used. Still, everything I bought was fun to play, especially the Wolfenstein port and Immercenary. 3DO had some bangers.
We are watching the XBOX and PS5 failing in real time. Without a steady stream of new games, these systems are paperweights. I miss the good old days of Xbox 360/PS3/ Wii where we had a VARIERTY of games rather than just first person shooters and open world RPG. We had Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, Rock Band... They even got flight sims and other driving sims going. What's happened?
I always found that the biggest issue with the 3DO was that it competed too much with PCs and not other consoles. It's PC ports were good as ports, but couldn't live up to their PC releases. Then they lacked the accessibility or fun factor of the popular mainstream console releases at the time. It was very much ahead of it's time and as a result relied on shoveling out PC ports while the console developers caught up. By the time they did it was time for the Saturn and PSX to release.
I bought one in the store when it came out, I was totally suckered by the hype. I was selling computers while going to school at the time. I don't remember all the games I had for the 3DO but my favorites were Star Control and Madden.
“If you play video games, in some way, you’ve interacted with a product from Trip Hawkins”. I’ve never really thought about it before but I don’t think I’ve ever played an EA game and I’ve never played any of the games mentioned in this video. I do remember the 3DO commercials though, and, oh boy I was amazed and wanted one. But of course the price was insane so that never happened.
All I remembered about 3DO was the super creepy voicing saying 3DO. Also Gex was added to Astrobot a few weeks ago so that should tell you about its success on 3DO
Got mine on clearance at Best buy in Illinois. Console was 30$ and the games were like 5$ each and there was actually a really large selection. Had blast playing it until the ps1 took over my life around the time FF7 came out
I asked my dad to buy the 3DO (great dad) a store was being liquidated. Don’t recall the price but can’t be that cheap. We sold it later to buy PS1 but I managed to buy one 13 years ago.. happy to buy it again to play Road Rash and Need for Speed.
I remember playing the 3DO in a sears or some department store way back in the day. I can’t even remember the game, I think some mech game? It absolutely sucked but at the time and playing for only a couple minutes it seemed awesome. I don’t think I ever played a 3D0 ever again. I’m not very sad either lol :)
Nice video. I picked up my FZ-1 in early 1995 just before the Saturn came out. I loved it, with Road Rash and Need for Speed still being favorites. My buddy Dan and I played Twisted all the time after school... but at the end of the year when i had a Saturn and a PS1 in my room, the 3DO started to get played less and less, unfortunately. I still have mine now, after i gave it to Dan over 20 years ago but just got it back recently after he passed away. I miss him so i boot up the machine once in a while to remember him... This system really was special for a lil while there!
We are sorry for your loss.
@nicholaswinebrenner5164 thank you
Road Rash was amazing. I don't know if it was 700 buck amazing, but amazing.
Same. Also got the 3DO at launch and was blown away playing Need for Speed and Road Rash. In hindsight, I regret getting rid of my 3DO and the Dreamcast. Now I just play on PC.
When I was a kid everyone had either SNES or Sega. The only place we ever saw a 3DO or Jaguar was in the magazines.
My uncle was literally the only person I knew who had a 3DO. He told me years later about how his buddies laughed a him for wasting his money.
He also bought a Playstation when they were first released in the US in late 1995. Everybody thought he made the same mistake again, but that console proved to be a success.
@@AdhamOhm Sounds like your uncle was a tech enthusiast and early adopter to me. The only way I could hate that is if I was jealous. 😎
@ He was and still is. I learned a lot about computers and video games through him when I was younger.
Great summary. Got a used FZ-10 for around $130 in about 1996. Calling the Saturn a failure in a 3DO video is an interesting choice -- It was Sega's most successful console in Japan and had a long life.
The Saturn did well in its domestic market, but failed internationally when compared to the N64 and PlayStation. The games industry was shifting towards the new frontier of 3D at the time, and the Saturn was a machine built primarily for 2D games.
The PS1 also had the edge of being a far less complicated machine to develop for: you only had to wrangle one main processor and one graphics chip, as opposed to the Saturn’s two CPUs and three GPU chips.
On top of the Saturn being much harder to develop for, Sega was also much stingier about how they handled both development resources & game licensing compared to Sony. Sony was not afraid to give out development libraries for the console that were competent and took advantage of the hardware’s features, whereas Sega internally struggled to even give access to their best libraries *to first-party developers.*
Unlike most countries, Japan stuck with the idea of 2D games for longer than the rest of the world due to motion sickness issues. Japan’s arcade market was also still going strong at the time, which benefited a lot of games that ended up getting ported to the Saturn: the PlayStation had a bigger emphasis on longer-form games.
In summary: both development reasons and cultural reasons were responsible for the Saturn’s failure internationally
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581 Another factor was that the Saturn was very expensive to make.
Sega touted a total of eight processors in the Saturn in their advertising.
The problem, however, was that these were discrete processors whereas the PlayStation relied on integration, incorporating multiple processors into fewer large scale custom ICs.
It also helped that Sony had their own resources to design and make chips to a degree that Sega didn't have.
And Sony kept revising the PlayStation, incorporating more functions into fewer chips, simplifying the board design as well as the console's construction, leading to reduced manufacturing costs. On the other hand, Sega was stuck with a complex design and expensive manufacturing of the Saturn, even after design revisions, because the board still had to accommodate eight separate processors. So every time Sony lowered the price of the PlayStation on account of their reduced production costs, Sega was forced to follow suit to stay competitive, losing more money for each Saturn they sold.
@@crimson-foxtwitch2581if Sega had provided better developer resources, kept the September 2 launch and gotten a real Sonic game out I bet the Saturn would have sold double its units. It definitely was a 2D powerhouse but it could hold its own in 3D, with some magic it can even be better than the PlayStation and N64 with the right tools
The surprise Saturn launch in the US backfired in their face while also the original Playstation debuting at $299. $100 cheaper. By 1997 the Playstation was only $150 and was overtaking everything.
The Saturn was significantly more expensive to produce than the Playstation, both thanks to its complex design and Sony's vertical integration. Sony didn't need to buy disc drives and chips from other companies, they could just make them themselves. Sony also had other, large industries it could fall back on, like movies and music, which made hardware price cuts much easier to swallow. Because Sega was losing so much money per unit sold, their bean counters decided to just sell fewer consoles, which positively affected losses but made the system less visible to consumers and harder to buy. Not the best strategy when your goal is to make up for hardware losses with more software sales.
They also crippled themselves by abruptly dropping support for the Genesis, which was still selling strong in 1995, as 16-bit titles still made up the majority of sales that year. That would have been an easy source of revenue that could have helped them cope with Saturn losses.
Wow many many years ago I was helping a friend pack some things from his home in CA. When I spotted this weird console among some the items he wanted pack for the move. When I asked about it he told me that it had been the first disk based console and that his dad had bought it for him as a Xmas present. I’m of course me having grown up in a more conventional (poor) family had never heard of this console before. He also told me that it kind of sucked and had not liked much. However when the original Xbox launched his dad had also bought him an Xbox on launch day along with every single game that it launched with. Best time of my life when we spent 12 hours beating Halo in one sitting. Ryan if you’re out there thanks for the best memories of my entire youth.
PC engine CD rom-2 was the first disk based system in 1988. Sega CD even came out before the 3DO.
Track Ryan down and go for a drink!
@@Robert-nu4vc 3do was first console disc player, pc was first disc system.
Growing up, my friend got one when it came out. We were probably too young to really enjoy the system, but I remember not really liking any of the games he had which was probably most if not all of them. We quickly went back to a steady diet of Nintendo and Sega with games like Super Mario Kart and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 which have clearly stood the test of time. The 3DO mostly just lived on the shelf, and while he got more games for it as they came out, we rarely if ever touched them. At the end of the day, I really think that the one thing that really matters for gaming system is the game library. Without games, no amount of technology advancement and innovation will save a system.
The 90's were wild concerning electronics and gaming. As a 13-year old in 1993 I loved all the different systems trying to compete. Not that I owned all of them (came from an Atari 800XL, C64, NES, SNES, Megadrive), but played various systems at friend's houses. The sheer amount of tech evolving was fantastic. Not only the expensive 3DO, but also the Neo Geo line of products. The jump up from each generation was interesting and made me love tech in general.
Hey, another old-timer like me, same age as I was back then! That really was a great and revolutionary time for gaming, crazy stuff was being tried, system wars were in full swing, and bits were everything. Kids today don't know how nuts it was to be a kid back then.
hey i was 13 back then too. you are not wrong it was a wild time. It seemed like every week there was something new and high tech coming out and evolving at such a rapid rate. I went from Atari 2600, C64 Atari ST in the 80's to Megadrive, PS1 in the 90's. What a trip
I was 13 in 1993, too, and the video game industry was booming. Especially when Mortal Kombat came to the arcades.
Exactly. The number of systems was extremely frustrating and exciting at the same time. If you had been a millionaire, affording all of them would've been an amazing blast. But most of us could only afford one every five years which often meant leaping over entire generations of consoles/computer systems -- for better and for worse.
Star Control 2 on the 3DO changed how I looked at games. Also had Twisted, Road Rash(good soundtrack), and Madden(loved the team previews). Cost way too much, I saved almost a year for one. Glad I did
I still have MY original 3DO and a amazing game library for it. Still playing it along with my Xbox.
I remember seeing this system in Software etc and being completely blown away. I remember seeing the $700 price tag and being sad about it. $700 is a lot today. in 1993, it felt unobtainable.
Its a non-starter for the majority of buyers. Should've been around $375-$400.
In 1993 about six months after it came out, I actually won a 3DO in a contest. I live in Pennsylvania now but at the time as a child, I was 12 years old and my grandfather took me to a GameStop or game exchange. I think it was called at the time and I exchange the video game for another one and the clerk told me that they had a contest to win one. I am typically an unfortunate person I feel like, however, I filled it out. Drop my slip in the box and to my surprise, about six weeks later, they reached out and told me that I won it for free. I picked it up, and I loved the game crash and burned, although it was difficult to advance in. The graphics were incredible. They have video cut scenes in the games which were unheard of. Eventually, I want to say that I picked up a disc that had a game on it with several samples a video games. Maybe even that CD came with the console as well. Obviously, as you said not much came out after it and I was a child is not as if I could afford to buy anything myself. I kept the console for many years after I’ll probably didn’t get rid of it until I was about 20 years old. I just kept it almost as a novelty. I tried to tell some people about it and most people don’t even remember that it existed. So I had to click on this video because it took me back. My name is David Dailey
Dear Dave, thank you for your emotional story, I can really feel with you! When I was young I attended secondary school in central Europe. My parents were poor and I never could afford any video consoles in the 90ies. I used to go to a video game store after school. There I could play sometimes 3DO games on a demo console. I remember having played Need for Speed as well as Crash'n Burn. Sometimes the shop owner told us children that we would have to leave the shop if we didn't buy anything. It was annoying, but I came back every week again. I felt some kind of envy to those people who could afford a 3DO console in those days. It cost more than 1000 DM. This is the reason why today I possess as a collector all 4 different 3DO consoles: Panasonic FZ1, FZ10, Goldstar and Sanyo.
I ordered an FZ-1 from the Sears catalog in 1994 when I was 14 years old with money I saved from my paper route at the time. I wanna say it was $400 at the time and came with Crash & Burn and Jurassic Park Interactive. I was the coolest kid in my class because of it lol. I loved it. Some great gems like the two Wing Commander games, Star Fighter, Quarantine, Star Control 2, Immercenary, the list goes on and on. I ended up owning over 100 titles due to a video rental store near me going out of business. The owner rented out 3DO titles and I was one of the only people in town that rented them out. As the store was closing, he offered to sell me 60 or so titles for $50 which I jumped on.
I was probably 12 or 13 when Mom sent was to a Disney vacation from Brazil, each one of the brothers with a very limited budget to just survive the trip for a little over a week or so. However, I have always being a believer and had great expectations in the industry. Decided to "invest" all of my finance on a Goldstar console, along with a copy of Samurai Showdown that up until today, after watching your video, never fully understood why that guy was so nice to give a copy of that game to me, only to bring the console back to our hotel room, and start an argument with my older brothers over who was going to pay for my food, throughout those remaining days of our vacation.
- money well spent my man, always lock on your dreams to make it a reality. Anything is possible, and this was one of my American Dreams. God Bless America
Only problem is that life is a MOTHERFUCKER right now... Back in the 90s, it was still OK to have these dreams.
I remember a neighbor got a 3DO. The only things I really remember was this 'game' that as you pressed buttons and the control pad, it would put in different colors as it turned and blended. And they had an episode of '2 stupid dogs' 😂
In 1993, games to me went from Super Mario World and Sonic 2, to StarFox showing off 3D on SNES, to 3DO saying "hold my beer" and just dropping into the chat with Crash 'n Burn. I absolutely immediately had a need for that console. I didn't get one straight away, but after the price drop, I was able to get an FZ-1 with Super Street Fighter II Turbo and ordered two Capcom Soldier pads for it. I still play that game, as well as many others for the console. It may not have fared well on the market, but it has a pretty decent library. If anything, I was a little mad that Saturn and PS1 weren't dramatically better despite coming out a comfortable amount of time later.
I have a 3D0. I got it from a friend who worked at a game store and they were let know not to expect a last paycheck. So they took games and systems. My friend gave me the 3D0. I loved it and owned a Playstation as well. The 3D0 was a poor man's gaming pc, allowing you to play lots of CD ROM titles.
I've had many hours and hours of fun playing this system. Began collecting when the games were tossed into the bargin bins.
I've got some rare peripheals and several versions of the console. My pride of the collection is a SANYO T.R.Y. with a NMEMO usb drive emulator installed.
Star Control II took 10 years of exploration and coordinate note taking to finally save the galaxie from the Urquan.
Ten years?! Wow!
Yes, I bought one a few months after it was released at Serramonte Center in Daily City, CA for $699. I picked up the 3DO console along with the pack in game Crash 'n Burn, Waialae Country Club and Total Eclipse. I took it over to my dad's house in San Francisco so we could play Waialae Golf. My dad wasn't a gamer, but was amazed at the realisim of the course. The 3DO actually has a lot of great games. SFII Turbo, Road Rash, John Madden Football, FIFA, Doom, Rebel Assault, Mad Dog McCree, PGA Tour Golf, and Wing Commander were the best versions at the time on any console.
My father bought our 3DO across the way at good guys electronics in Daly City. I remember it looked very realistic and we picked up road rash and escape from monster manor.
It was an amazing system.
@@JGcali650 I miss The Goodguys
Bought a brand new Goldstar 3DO at EB games for $79.99 in the late 90's. I think it came with Sewer Shark, and I had a bough quite a few other games like Killing Time, Need for Speed, Hell, Quarantine, Wolfenstein 3D and D. I wish D would come to Steam like Killing Time.
A small percentage of millennial kids had the Panasonic 3DO and the Phillips CD-i. Why? Because they were so damn expensive when they were released!. My friend had the CD-i and I loved playing Dragon's Lair and Space Ace on it.
Seeing the demos of this thing in stores back in 1993 was bananas, even the computers didnt have anything that looked as good. The console may have been a commercial failure, but it was cutting edge technology when it came out, nothing could touch it for years. Maybe if 3do had pockets as deep as microsoft or sony, they could have sold it at a lost and established a proper market share, make up the profits down the road like Sony did with the ps3, but it was obvious with its $699 CAD price tag, only the rich or extremely dedicated would be able to own one.
I got mine during the Christmas of 1994 for $400. At the time it was miles ahead of anything else that was out. Games like shockwave and Madden 94 blew my friend's mines. It always puzzled me why they never showed commercials for games on the system.
I was a kid, but I do remember seeing the 3D0 on display at the Babbages near the food court in Moreno Valley Mall back in 1994
I played "Way of the Warrior" at the demo kiosk in Media Play and remember being blown away by the audio quality. $700 was just out of the question though.
Got Burgled and lost my Amiga A1200, Commodore were going bust so an A1200 was out of the question. Saw Edge Magazine with Ridge Racer on the cover which I had just played in the arcades so wondered what that was about. Read all about Playstation, but in the center review section was a game called Road Rash on 3DO which got 9/10. I had to have it. This was around September 1994. Went to a small shop in my town who were getting 1 unit in and it was going to a customer. I convinced the shop to sell it to me instead. I didn't get Road rash with it I got Total Eclipse as I had a UK PAL unit. For 3 months I played Fifa/Road Rash/Total Eclipse and Shock Wave.. I swapped my PAL unit for an NTSC 3DO and by Dec 94 got a Playstation from Japan. At the time I also had a Neo Geo CDZ. A year later I bought a Saturn and a year after that an N64. By then 3DO was boxed up and not much used. I still have it, the NTSC model is still in my collection from 1994. The 3DO is the reason I met someone in the games industry, because the shop I bought my 3DO was owned by Dave Cox, who went on to be a creative lead in Castlvania on PS3/360. Due to my commitment of big spending in his shop he put me in the special thanks section of the credits of his games.
Dave just said, "who?" 😂
I bought one in 1994 for $699 after breaking up with my girlfriend at the time. I was poor at the time but needed something to help out. I put it on the credit card and eventually paid it off. 30 years later I still have it and it still plays most of the original cds I bought for it. Pretty crazy.
When I was a stupid and gullible 13-year-old kid, the ads for 3DO in GamePro magazine, along with the system previews, totally sold me on it. My mother actually bought me the FZ-1 model for full sticker price of $700 for Christmas 1993, which still amazes me to this day. It was a great system at the time, and I was blown away by how real everything looked and sounded back then on it. Road Rash, Star Control II, Twisted, D, Crash n' Burn... all great games for the 3DO that I fondly remember. Yes the system was expensive as hell but as long as you had the cash to burn, it was worth it... for a time at least. Until the PlayStation came along.
Why it failed:
1. The price
2. The price
3. The price
4. The price
5. The price
I would also add- the price.
But now price don't matter look at PS5 and PS5 pro
@@jameswatson5807 yes, its another time right now. When parents buy stuff for their kids (or themselves) by taking loans or paying in installments. Expansive stuff for hundreds of dollars. That never happened in the 90's.
Now you pay 399 for the console and 200 per game that you only rented digitally ✌🏻
Absolute win, thanks to everyone who supported this system 🖕🏻
@@nee3029 steam killed physical sales for PC, then consoles started to follow digital games only.
I saw Total eclipse in a department store, me and my friend were amazed by the graphics. We decided to split half and half to buy it.. but for some reason I ended up with it lol. No clue how that happened. Crash and burn was very good, Road rash. I liked way of the warrior because Ive never heard rock music in video games before. Definitely a much better system than Jaguar.
I never had a 3do when it was new. Unfortunately, being a 1st grader at the time produced no income. However, not long before it was discontinued, the local video game store put there display model and a bunch of games on sale for $30 and I was able to get it. It was amazing to me at the time. I ended up getting a PS1 and it was played sparingly. I still have it, it's the Goldstar version. Games I remember most are Need for Speed, Doom, and Alone in the Dark.
I love your video documentaries! They are so well produced and narrated. Keep up the great work!
I was lucky as a teenager, my older brother bought a 3DO and we really loved it. Star Control II, the 3DO-specific version of Road Rash, the definitive version of Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition, Return Fire, so many great games. Obviously the system had its issues, but I will always look back on this system so fondly. Cheers for the video!
When I was in elementary school and they announced the 3DO was going to be $700 I knew it would fail before it released. $700 for a game console in 1993 was madness
In 1995, people paid 1000-2000€ for the launch of the Playstation.
I remember that in 2000 we paid 900DM (680€) for the PS2 with 1 game 🥺
Today people will cry if the price is not below 399 directly at launch 🤦🏼♂️
@@nee3029 Cuz the cost of living was much lower and people had more job stability back then... Times were different back then.
The ONLY THING that REALLY DESTROYED the 3DO , was that it was TOO DA*N EXPENSIVE 😂. The Neo-Geo was $500 bucks, the controller $300, and games $100. And to think that there was MORE EXPENSIVE HARDWARE actually sitting on the shelf😂...just ludicrous
I already has a SNES at the time if I recall, and this was one of those rare weekends that Dad splurged - albeit at the video rental store. So I got to try it for a few days, or maybe it was a week. The only game, perhaps the only one we rented (which seems odd, maybe the other games were bad) was Quarantine. It was pretty cool. I remember being enamored with the design of the 3DO (Panasonic version). But then we returned the system and I got an N64 for a Christmas soon thereafter.
My best friend got one for Xmas the year it launched. $700
We knew about it but only because of Night Trap, that was the only thing people talked about & after we got it, it was very underwhelming. Was just a movie you watched and pressed a few buttons to switch cameras etc. Instead of porting all the “hot” games at the time they created their own and they all were shit games….at least they were at launch. Was like a $700 generic gaming console. Video brought me back! Enjoyed video!
"SHIT GAMES" 😝
My friend's bother bought an FZ-1 in mid-1994, for $400. Even back then, there was a LOT of talk about the M2 add-on, which is one of the reasons he decided to buy it. He had a decent amount of games for it, including Road Rash, Need For Speed, Madden '94, Slam N Jam, Gex, and quite a few others. The second half of 1994 was a pretty good year for the system, because if you had those games, you weren't really lacking for enjoyment and the system really did feel like a big leap over the SNES. The Playstation and Saturn were still over a year away (at least the Saturn WAS, until the surprise launch at E3 which was a terrible mistake), and the 3DO looked poised to compete relatively well with the early titles on those machines.
Unfortunately, what seemingly nobody expected is how strong the 16-bit market remained, with 16-bit titles still making up the majority of sales even through the end of 1995. Sega prematurely ended support for the Genesis, which did little more than deny themselves extra revenue that could have helped make up for losses with the Saturn. Meanwhile, Nintendo had no choice but to continue strong support for the SNES thanks to the many delays of the N64, which led to some of its best games being released. As much as I love Gex, games like Donkey Kong Country really managed to narrow the gap, if not eliminate it altogether, thanks to quality programming and outstanding artwork. Nintendo just had a larger, better group of third-party developers for the SNES than 3DO could compete with, and the cutthroat nature of the industry meant it would only be a matter of time before they ran out of money to keep the platform going.
While working on the M2 hardware, which eventually got sold to Matsushita for $100 million, 3DO's hardware group were also working on its successor, often called "MX." In 1997, 3DO sold their hardware business to Samsung for $20 million, and it became known as CagEnt, who had entered talks with Nintendo to license the MX technology in the Gamecube. This deal fell apart, apparently because Nintendo wanted to buy CagEnt outright and Samsung couldn't reach an agreement on the terms of the sale. Nintendo ended up working with ArtX instead for the Gamecube, and eventually CagEnt was sold to Microsoft, who turned it into their WebTV division, the same division that would be enlisted to create a competing design to the startup Xbox team within Microsoft. The WebTV team supposedly designed a more multimedia-focused machine, which eventually lost out to the PC hardware-based, game-focused machine the Xbox team came up with. However, the WebTV team's influence would return with the design of the Xbox 360 (and later Xbox One).
So 3DO's influence on the industry was pretty dramatic, even long after the company exited the console business.
NGL,I got the 3DO when it dropped to $150, had the OG Panasonic model, and I LOVED it. Gex was a blast, I loved Crash N Burn, Road Rash was brilliant, and I loved & hated Way of the Warrior and Guardian War. But I genuinely enjoyed Lucianne's quest. May not have been the best RPG by far, but it was enjoyable. Wish the system would have had more games, but I enjoyed what i played. And OMG I still love the stupid insanity of the game show game Twisted! The characters you could play as were so hysterically B movie, but still so much fun. Ahhh memories 💖
I was 16 when the 3DO came out. A friend of mine had one and after getting hooked playing Crash and Burn for hours, I convinced my father to go half and half with me to buy our own. It also came with a demo disc that had a 2 Stupid Dogs cartoon that was pretty funny. My favorite games: Way of the Warrior which used White Zombie's La Sexorcisto album as the soundtrack; Jurassic Park which had one of the earliest and most effective jump scares in the building levels with the raptors hunting you; Dragon's Lair which looked great. A few years ago, I finally reacquired my old 3D0 which had somehow fallen into the hands of my sister, and it sort of launched my console repair side hustle. It remains one of the fondest memories I have of my father.
There was a game for this called (I think) Trip'd. In my hometown there was a solely video game rental store and he had everything. My friend and I were in there all the time and we knew the owner really well, so when this game came out we would have late night sessions playing this game (we also played a bunch of Super Bomberman).
I never got one myself because they WERE expensive, but I also didn't understand what was going on with the multiple units. Goldstar was the company that made really cheap VCRs, and I never wanted to drop money on anything with the Goldstar name after I got burned by one of their VCRs that ate itself rather quickly (and a few of my movies, as I recall).
The Panasonic one seemed better built but I just never had the money for one.
It failed just like the Neo Geo did. The launch price. I was one of the dumb people who bought the 3DO at launch. I was the only one I knew that actually owned one. It was too late by time they launched the cheaper top loader versions to save it. The 3DO was what made me stop buying electronics when they first launched. At least until the Dreamcast launched anyway.
Fun fact: the 3DO is one of the very few game consoles that doesn't have ANY copy protection measures. Anyone could make 3DO games and sell them without permission. I'm pretty sure you can just burn game ISOs to discs with computers and have them work in the system with no effort.
It's true they don't. But the systems are very finicky about what discs they will and won't read. You may have heard about Limited Run doing a 3DO game not too long ago where they used burned discs and a lot of 3DO owners couldn't get them to work. My 3DO will happily read any pressed CD all day long but the second it gets a burned disc it has a fit and won't read it no matter what manufacturer, burner, or burn speed used. A lot of the systems are like mine, where others will read some discs from certain manufacturers. It's a roll of the dice.
@notneb82 that's probably the lasers dying out. The 3D0 is a ticking time bomb now a days.
Yea my FZ-10 will only read a handful of burned games. I'm not sure if it has anything to do with the type of disc. I really think it has to do with burn speed. 10x is the lowest mine goes. And you have to burn these at a very low speed.
I remember there was a Panasonic 3DO setup at Sears. It had some golf game to try out. The graphics seemed pretty good, but I'm sure the price kept it from being a serious possibility.
Good video.
I wasn’t willing to drop that kind of cash on a system back then. And if I did want to it would have been on a NeoGeo and not a 3DO. Of course, the NeoGeo had the additional complication of the games also being very expensive. But, man, what a system. NeoGeo games still look great and are fun to play today. The 3DO? Not so much.
I had the Goldstar 3DO. I remember the controls being quirky and somewhat difficult. The live action movie clips in the games were cool but I remember the video quality being grainy. Not many games were actually fun to play because they were essentially movies with limited user interaction. I would press a few buttons then have to wait for a long movie clip to play before being able to resume. It essentially felt more like selecting scenarios followed by watching a series of movie clips that could not be skipped. Overall, I agree the idea of the 3DO at the time was admirable but the gameplay was poor. I quickly moved on to the PlayStation and never looked back. My 3DO was retired to a shelf in my closet for a few years and eventually traded at my local game store for store credit.
The FZ-10 looks so cool. Its a shame 3DO and its licencees were insistent on pricing the console at $699.(absolutely insane even reading that.)
Im gonna armchair strategize and say that, they should've pegged it at $349. That way it could've got a leg up on Sega at the very least. What could've been. On the bright side, Gex was the All-star for that system. In hindsight, they also shouldve had more exclusivity deals with studios like Crystal Dynamics. Imagine Tomb Raider for the 3DO, and Gex being a console mascot.
Still have my FZ-1 when I bought it back in 2001. Paid $30 for it at a used game shop. I think they were just trying to get rid of it. XD
I can still recall earlier like back in '96 or '97 when all of the 3DO games listed in those magazine mail order catalogues were going for DIRT-CHEAP... Like around only 3 to 5 bucks per game. I knew that wasn't a very good sign for the system.
I had a 3DO. I won a Virtual Boy in a holiday contest, and... it was absolutely awful. At the time the 3DO and Virtual Boy (at least the edition I had won) were the same price at the store I won from and they were kind enough to let me return the VB and swap it for the 3DO.
I loved my 3DO back then. Star Control 2, Gex, and Wing Commander were some of my favorite games of all time.
The 3DO had a lot going for it, but it was killed by unfortunate timing, and the fact that its business model and its hardware were incompatible. Either one could have reached market success, but not both together. If the business model had been paired up with innovative but cheap hardware (like the Nintendo Wii), it could've been hugely successful. If a traditional game hardware company with deep pockets, first party developers, and hefty royalties for third parties had brought the 3DO hardware to the market at a reasonable price (losing money on the hardware), it also could have succeeded (or been more successful).
Hindsight is 20/20, but what I would've done in Trip Hawkins' shoes is make the game royalties higher (while still lower than Nintendo and Sega), then start a bidding war between hardware manufacturers for 1 year of manufacturing exclusivity if they'd sell it at a loss, and split the game royalties with them until they recouped their losses. The console launches at a better price and finds a bigger install base, the exclusive hardware manufacturer recoups losses from game royalties and gets to be synonymous with the 3DO brand for the first year of its life, and future hardware manufacturers are entering the market once economies of scale for the custom chips and other components have brought the manufacturing price down to more reasonable levels.
I don't think this would have made the 3DO a real competitor against the PS1, Saturn, and N64, but I think it could have sold much better and carved out a bigger niche for itself. Ultimately it came to market as a bleeding-edge device at a time where hardware was improving at breakneck speeds and rapidly becoming more affordable. The high price prevented it from finding a market, and competitors were able to render it obsolete with cheaper hardware a couple years after it launched.
Sort of a shame as it never reached its potential. Homebrew projects like the Tomb Raider port and Mortal Kombat II port show that developers could have gotten more out of the system.
It was the price that killed it as much as the competition and lack of software. Everyone already had a snes or Genesis, and a few of us had already tried a neo geo or turbographix 16, so that much $$$ when new models of existing hardware were already on the Horizon just didn't make sense. The only kids i knew with 3dos had $3000 pcs too and parents who spent money on gaming for themselves which were rare at the time.
I got a 3DO for my 13th birthday, about a month after launch. But that wasn't the original plan. I actually wanted and got an Atari Jaguar, which launched in November, so we delayed my birthday gift a little bit. I got the Jaguar home and it was DOA. Took it back to Software Etc (there's another throwback store) and they didn't have another Jaguar and no idea when it would be available. So as I looked around I saw the 3DO and started looking at it and the games. It was obviously A LOT more money, but my dad saw I was disappointed and offered to get the 3DO instead. The rest is history. I still have it, but I don't use it, because I have a Japanese 3DO now as well with the 240p mode switch. My favorite games for it are Return Fire, Space Hulk, Twisted, Way of the Warrior, Need for Speed, Madden, and Slam N Jam. I had a lot of fun with it and still do today. In the end, the 3DO was a failure, BUT not as big of a failure as the Jaguar was. At least I have 10-15 games I enjoy playing on it, vs 2-3 on the Jaguar. :)
Correction, the Saturn did NOT come out in North America in Nov 1994, it was May of 1995 ahead of it's planned fall 1995 launch date which caused several retailers to boycott selling the device all together.
His mentality was way ahead of its time. We started to see multimedia gaming consoles till the 2000s with the xbox and ps2 with dvd players, music players, online gaming, then the following generation even had online apps with their consoles. He was trying to do this one and all device in 1993.
I bought my 3DO system used at a Bazaar for $180 in early 1995. I bought the ten games they were selling with it for $60. The system wasn't so much ahead of its time, but right at the point when it could be compared to everything else coming out. It couldn't compete with the good will Sega still had with the Genesis, Nintendo's "legend" status, and Sony's genius marketing and stable product. By the time I got my 3DO, it was a curious also-ran. Same with Jaguar, which I also owned at one point that same year. I settled on a Saturn in 96, then cruised with PSX through the late-90s, dabbling in N64.
A friend of mine got one for Christmas. It seemed impressive at the time. I was gaming on a 486 SX-33 at the time and I remember being excited at the prospect of buying a 3D0 card for it. I also briefly wanted the Jaguar for Alien vs Predator. I am thankful that I did not buy either of those things.
You dodged a couple of bullets there. The Jaguar 🐆😂😂😂😂
My older brother had this in the 90s, I was 6 or 7 I think. We loved it! My favorite games to play were Gex, Road Rashh, Mega Race, Espape from Monster Manor, Crash and Burn, and Dragons lair.
I remember seeing a TV show playing Need for Speed, and thinking it looked better than what was even in the arcades at the time.
But it was just too darn expensive. and by the time they caught on to this, the PS1 and the Saturn were out.
Damn you're on like every video LOL.
yeah 3do was too late and too soon at the same time
@@fightkostka I worked in an EB Games just before the PS1 came out, and we had a ton of unsold 3DO stock on an entire isle of the store. We even had to put up a new advertising campaign for them stating, "Don't Buy a Dodo, Buy 3DO", we had great fun covering over the "Don't" part :P
Bad Influence!
In 1994, my dad worked at Panasonic (he assembled t.v.s) and with his income tax return, he took us to Best Buy and bought the FZ-1 model 3DO, an extra controller , Road Rash, A game called Flying Nightmares, and another space shooter named Shockwave (I remember the opening scene with a “News” report and aliens)
My older brother, working at TGIFridays, took some of his paycheck and bought Super Street Fighter 2: The New Challengers (I whooped him with my favorite, Chun Li), AD&D: Slayer, and Brain Dead 13. Over the next year, he would buy other games like Monster Manor, Alone in the Dark (that game actually terrified me lol), The Horde (little red creatures ate cows and said “Mmm numnum!” I thought it was adorable!) Guardian War, Space Hulk (another that terrified me), Psychic Detective and many more (Thanks to my brother for remembering all these games!)
I picked up an FZ-1 earlier this year in bad shape and haven't gotten around to it. I first ran into the system when myself and a cousin found one at a garage sale in early 99. We had a blast with it.
I like this channel, you dont slow down your speech forcing me to go at 1.25 or 1.5x speed. You earned this sub
I remember the 3DO launch. We probably could have afforded to buy one but didn’t. PC gaming was really coming on in this time. It had all the same things. If you could afford this console you could probably afford a PC. Couple that with many of the 3DO games being PC ports and the lack of a “killer app” and you have no compelling reason to go to it.
Man I remember the FMV days. I thought it was so cool at the time. I remembering getting Wing Commander 4 and being stunned by the amount of game disks. No way I was going to be copying that to a hard drive.
I loved my 3DO FZ-10. I bought it when I was about 12 years old with money I saved up. Maddog McCree I & II were great fun with the orange gun. I also spent a lot of time on the original Need for Speed. I was amazed by the sound that they recorded from real cars. This was unique to the 3DO as I recall.
Appreciate the work you did to research and make this video. I had a love/hate with the 3DO day one. I never had one, but one of my gamer friends did. I was a hardcore Street Fighter II player, learning the game in the arcades, bowling alley's, donut shops and pizza parlors. I lived and breathed that game for years playing it in it's first iteration and everyone following and spending God knows how many quarters over those few years. I was blown away with the Super Nintendo version back in those day. I actually imported a Super Famicom so I could buy SFII six months before it came out in America. ANYWAYS, years later the 3DO has Super Street Fighter II Turbo (X). It was ALMOST a perfect arcade translation and up and until that point ALL home console versions were inferior to the arcade versions. I would have sold my appendix to buy a 3DO JUST to play Super Street Fighter II Turbo except for one problem. The ground didn't move in Mode 7 like 3D imitation. Something that was glaringly missing from the 3DO port. Even the Super Nintendo had the cool Mode 7/3D imitation ground movement. Because of that I knew that 3DO was NOT the real deal and NOT worth it's price. If it could have nailed that game I would have found a way to buy it but nah. Dissapointing for that price and it couldn't even replicate my favorite arcade game's background (ground) animations. Fail.
Back in 1993/94 I had a good friend who bought the 3DO close to launch for its $600+ price tag. (We were 15 years old at the time, so there is no way he would be able to afford that himself. His dad bought it as a gift.) In short, we loved that dang thing! I have fun memories staying up all night with him playing road rash, super street fighter two, wing commander 3 (with Mark Hamill), Need for speed, Quarantine (a fun and gory taxi game), Gex, and so many of the other hidden gems that were on that system. Even after the PlayStation came out, we gave the 3DO lots of love. Road rash was a better game on the 3DO than on PSX, in my opinion. There were also a handful of decent light gun games that people don’t generally talk about for the 3DO. What also tanked the 3DO (aside from the price) was the shovelware that began to plague the system-mostly poor-quality FMV games. But some of those games, like Mad Dog McCree, we’re actually pretty fun for the time. Ultimately, I think you just had to be there in order to appreciate firsthand the gems that were on that system, and the fact that they were the first to market. Thanks for the vid!
I worked at 3DO...it was a pretty cool environment. Game designers had cubicle "apartments, their own fridges, and worked a lot.
Trip was around the office a lot, and he was a real friendly guy.
I knew _one_ person with one of these. I never knew the family to have money. Five kids in a tiny house, and my friend's "bedroom" was literally a closet. An actual closet. Yet they had one of these.
You sound jealous
The 3DO was based on a novel and pretty clever idea, but that idea was also its achilles heel. No one was going to spend $700 on a console in the early-mid 90s (translates to something like $1500 today) that had an extremely limited library. And publishers didn't build up that library because no one was buying it. It was stuck in a cycle of doom.
We paid more for a PC. I don’t understand people which buy a PC only for gaming. Price drops are real. Problem was that 3do is still too slow for 3d.
I worked at a pizzeria for my first job, at 16 yrs old. The first big purchase I ever made was a Panasonic 3DO. I loved Star Control, Return Fire, Way of the Warrior, Off World Interceptor , Demolition Man, and more.
In Computer Shopper magazine, an article stated that the 3DO would be open to independent devs with a very cheap fee to acquire an SDK. I've no idea what total cost was but it got me excited. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be but still got my 3DO. A friend who did dev for the machine gave me several machines (Mac ii, NeXT slab) and CDs used but none of the testing/debugging gear. Would be fun to dive into the HW as it was quite fun to work with, I've been told.
I worked at babbages at the time, a computer and console game store. I was hyped on the 3DO at the time as the saga CD and 32x weren’t very good and the snes and genesis just felt outdated. At its original price it was never sold. When we marked it down, I still don’t know if it was ever sold…except for the one I bought and the one I got my friend to buy.
It was cool but as you said, the library was limited and it was hit or miss. FIFA was pretty awesome but I wasn’t a soccer fan, although I still remember being blown away by the sound in the game and I can still hear the crowd chanting and cheering. One of my favorite games at the time was road rash, great visuals, awesome sound track and what felt like at the time, a large playable world. The game I really wanted but ultimately never got was street fighter. It just came out way too late and the controller you needed wasn’t that great. By then the writing was on the wall and the impending launch of the Saturn, PlayStation, and n64, was what people were waiting for.
The lesson from the failed 3DO is that you need a library of games to sell systems and you need a good amount of good quality games (which is why the Saturn failed and the PlayStation became king).
Interesting side note: I still have that Panasonic 3DO and its original packaging and box and it looks as new as the day I bought it.
The 32bit console wars was a great time to be a gamer and a tech nerd as we got to see first hand the game industry evolve and healthy competition create some truly amazing games.
The pic @12:31 REALLY threw me off for a second! I thought I was seeing thing and had to a double take lol....I was like why is there a Nintendo Switch box in pic from the early 90's?!? Is this evidence of some time-traveling gamer? Alas, it took about a few second later I came to more logical and boring conclusion, that is just a old display in shop or some lucky collector's stash.
Man, what I wouldn't give to have old promotional store display like that in my collection...An old Nintendo SNES or 64 would be amazing, but I can only imagine what that would cost especially being something pretty rare, unique and a Ninetendo product(which like old Disney raises the price double, lol)! Hell I'd love to have one of the old Blockbuster display stands they used to have...I have so many memories of playing on those things back in the day whenever my family went to pick up a movie, and play all the new systems and used to beg to stay for just a little bit longer! Alas, I'll just have to admire from afar!
I really wish there more museums or public collections, where you could go and look and play with all the old game stuff...So much that kind of stuff is the hands of private collectors never to see the light of day ever again. I mean, I get it, if I had the money & time, I would totally build a massive retro collection but at the same time, I really think that there really needs to a LOT more preservation and new alterative ways for everyone to view , learn, and experience all of it old computers & videogames. Just like we have public libraries and art museums...we're kinda getting there, but at the rate we're going so much is going to be lost and/or forgotten before we ever get to that point, and it's just so depressing and frustrating.
12:26 - in store kiosks were around before Nintendo; Atari and Intellivision did them in the 2nd gen, and Magnovox had the Odyssey on demo display in it's official Magnovox stores.
12:28 I remember playing the 3DO in 1993 at The Incredible Universe in Hilliard, Ohio!! 12:10 -- see this is the problem with the console -- they featured many titles such as Mortal Kombat which you showed there. MK was one of those games that was on many platforms, with varying quality. The 3DO version seemed nice, but comparable to the PC version. So it was like that with many games -- the 3D0 version DID blow away the same or similar titles on the Genesis or SNES. And we were anticipating the next gen Sega console (info was ambiguous at the time, so we didn't know WHAT that would be). I already had nice PCs. That was the ONE thing that Dad "spoiled" me with - multiple computers, both PC and multiple Macs. So I had a PC with things like Doom, etc.
I won a Goldstar 3DO, could never have afforded one. I remember the joy of poring over the review of Need For Speed in the UK 3DO Magazine in eager anticipation of its release, and then spending countless hours driving the three short tracks (did it again recently thanks to emulation). It was a great console, just let down by a lack of support. Mine is now in my cupboard and the games safely stored away. Happy times.
the first time i ever saw the 3do was at service merchandise. i wanted one but not at the price they were asking. i was in a gaming store at Biloxi Mississippi mall many years ago. a guy brought in a mess load of gaming stuff & he had both Goldstar 3do & a Panasonic FZ-10 & i started talking to him & i asked him how much for both the 3do & the Panasonic FZ-10. he sold both of them to me for $15 each. so, i bought them both right in front of the store owner & i still got both units today
The reasons the 3DO failed are too numerous to list, and it couldn't even compete with the SNES, which was 3 year older technology and had a lot of games that even looked better than the 3DO.
In the early 2000s I had a roommate that had a Panasonic 3DO but honestly we were on PS2 by then so it didn't get much play time.
I was a huge Star Control 2 back then and I always wished at the time I could play it on the 3DO.
Launch Fighters.
Dodo! Jerk! STuw'pid! [sic]
Hi. Great video.
My first console ever was a SNES and when I was thinking of taking the next step, the 3DO was there. But it was too early for me too. Well, I was a kid and my parents weren't exactly rich but barely mid class. I was so fascinated by all that was advertised about the 3DO that I would've bought it the day before its launch.
When my parents could finally afford a better console, the PSX had already made a name for itself. Cheaper and with great games. Nearly a decade later, thanks to the internet I discovered the ugly truth about the 3DO and how unknowingly lucky I was.
I had the Goldstar variant back in the early 90's. I absolutely loved the system and thought it would be the future. Road Rash, Return Fire, Killing Time and D were my favorite titles. Friends would come over daily to play the system. Such good memories.
I had one of these things with the full library.. Loved this oddity
Good upload. Honestly, I never learned much about the 3DO. Some of the facts dropped here are really interesting.
I worked at EB games back in the early-mid 90s. Before I quit, I was able to score a new FZ-1 at a heavy discount as the 3DO was finishing its spiral down the drain. I bought a bunch of games for stupid cheap, too. I still have the 3DO but got rid of most of the games during our move back in 2003. Good thing I kept Road Rash, Star Control 2 & Immercenary - an underappreciated gem, IMO.
The FZ-1 is an anvil & was built to last. I should open it up and check the capacitors, but it still fires up and plays original games and CD-R copies. Great console!
I bought my Panasonic 3DO around 1995 for $400. I remember playing a demo disk with a racing game that would just loop over and over, but it was cool. Madden looked frickin R E A L haha. I ended up selling it for maybe $100 dollars. I wish I still had it. There is an emulator called “4DO” that can run ROMs pretty well on PC these days.
I remember playing it at the Good Guys (Electronic Store). Concept was cool, but ahead of its time.
I bought mine in college on release day. Put my self into debt with that one on my College CC. Favorite games are Star control 2 Space hulk and wing commander. I was the talk of the town in my dorm room since everyone was still rocking the NES. I still have my 3DO till this day. I fire it up once and a while to play starcontrol 2
3DOs biggest flaw was its game library.
The OUYA learned and suffered the same way. Limited, crappy game library.
The biggest flaw of the 3DO was its price. It had a decent game library , ut it could have been a lot better. Ultimately , he price of the console killed it, and by the time the price dropped, there were better consoles on the market.
It wasn't poor to terrible like the 32X or 'meh' like the Jaguar. It just didn't have classic franchise. It had a few like Super Street Fighter and Samurai Shodown.
17:12 N64 was not released in 1995 in any region.
I remember this infomercial they used to play for this on Comedy Central in the early morning in like '93-'94. Even as a kid I wasn't sold. It was like they were selling to grown ups who had no idea why people play video games. I preferred to have a Genesis, which would get a heck of a library. Same with the SNES. Even back then I thought FMV looked like crap.
I think the 3DO was less ahead of its time than it was greedy. If a company included the very latest of computer hardware, it gets ridiculously expensive. How did they not see this coming?
Yes, I had the FZ-10 and I remember playing Street Fighter II, Road Rash, Need for Speed (Car and Driver's Need for Speed back then), and Samurai Shodown. The first system I bought when I got my first job. I believe it was over $500 and bought it at Babbage's at the local mall. The sales guy kept telling me to wait and save my money and wait for this system called the play station instead.
The main reason for the failure of the 3DO was it was too expensive and by the time it got released , it soon became outdated . Same with the ATARI Jaguar .
The phrase you're looking for is "Information Superhighway" and it was in every computer related commercial after Windows 95 made PCs go mainstream.
I finally got my FZ-1 cheap last year... and it's obvious the lack of quality of the software library really tanked it. There was no way it could have competed against the Saturn and PlayStation.
I bought a 3DO FZ-10 from best buy for $100 with Gex as the pack in title. The only way to find games at that point was used. Still, everything I bought was fun to play, especially the Wolfenstein port and Immercenary. 3DO had some bangers.
We are watching the XBOX and PS5 failing in real time. Without a steady stream of new games, these systems are paperweights.
I miss the good old days of Xbox 360/PS3/ Wii where we had a VARIERTY of games rather than just first person shooters and open world RPG. We had Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, Rock Band... They even got flight sims and other driving sims going.
What's happened?
I always found that the biggest issue with the 3DO was that it competed too much with PCs and not other consoles. It's PC ports were good as ports, but couldn't live up to their PC releases. Then they lacked the accessibility or fun factor of the popular mainstream console releases at the time. It was very much ahead of it's time and as a result relied on shoveling out PC ports while the console developers caught up. By the time they did it was time for the Saturn and PSX to release.
I bought one in the store when it came out, I was totally suckered by the hype. I was selling computers while going to school at the time. I don't remember all the games I had for the 3DO but my favorites were Star Control and Madden.
“If you play video games, in some way, you’ve interacted with a product from Trip Hawkins”.
I’ve never really thought about it before but I don’t think I’ve ever played an EA game and I’ve never played any of the games mentioned in this video. I do remember the 3DO commercials though, and, oh boy I was amazed and wanted one. But of course the price was insane so that never happened.
All I remembered about 3DO was the super creepy voicing saying 3DO.
Also Gex was added to Astrobot a few weeks ago so that should tell you about its success on 3DO
Got mine on clearance at Best buy in Illinois. Console was 30$ and the games were like 5$ each and there was actually a really large selection. Had blast playing it until the ps1 took over my life around the time FF7 came out
I asked my dad to buy the 3DO (great dad) a store was being liquidated. Don’t recall the price but can’t be that cheap. We sold it later to buy PS1 but I managed to buy one 13 years ago.. happy to buy it again to play Road Rash and Need for Speed.
I remember playing the 3DO in a sears or some department store way back in the day. I can’t even remember the game, I think some mech game? It absolutely sucked but at the time and playing for only a couple minutes it seemed awesome.
I don’t think I ever played a 3D0 ever again. I’m not very sad either lol :)