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3DO
3DO is a video gaming hardware format developed by The 3DO Company and conceived by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins. The specifications were originally designed by Dave Needle and RJ Mical of New Technology Group, and were licensed by third parties; most hardware were packaged as home video game consoles under the name Interactive Multiplayer, and Panasonic produced the first models in 1993 with further renditions released afterwards by manufacturers GoldStar, Sanyo, Creative Labs, and Samsung Electronics.
Centered around a 32-bit ARM60 RISC-type processor and a custom graphics chip, the format was initially marketed as a multimedia one but this had shifted into purely video games within a year of launching. Despite having a highly promoted launch (including being named Time magazine's "1993 Product of the Year"), the oversaturated console market and the system's mixed reviews prevented it from achieving success comparable to competing consoles from Sega and Sony, leading to its discontinuation by 1996. In 1997, The 3DO Company sold its "Opera" hardware to Samsung, a year after offloading its M2 successor hardware to Panasonic.
The 3DO format was the brainchild of Electronic Arts (EA) founder Trip Hawkins; while at EA, he found himself frustrated with the limitations of developing software for different platforms that were incompatible with each other. Hawkins was inspired to create his own platform from his repeated recollection of a cartoon he saw on a wall at his previous employer, Apple Computer: it consisted of two vultures on a branch, with one suggesting to the other that they kill something instead of waiting to scavenge. Hawkins formed a unit within EA to work on the platform, but when it was spun off as The 3DO Company on September 12, 1991, he found no one willing to oversee it; he ultimately relinquished his role as chief executive of EA to oversee it himself while remaining at EA as its chairman. The 3DO name itself was an abbreviation of "three-dimensional optics", though it was also a play on the words "audio" and "video". The 3DO Company's objective was to create a next-generation, CD-based video game/entertainment standard which would be manufactured by various partners and licensees; 3DO would collect a royalty on each console sold and on each game manufactured. To game publishers, the low US$3 royalty rate per game was a better deal than the higher royalties paid to Nintendo and Sega when making games for their consoles. The 3DO hardware itself was designed by Dave Needle and RJ Mical (designers of the Atari Lynx), starting from an outline on a restaurant napkin in 1989. Trip Hawkins was a long-time acquaintance of Needle and Mical and found that their design very closely fit his philosophy for architecture and approach, so he decided: "Rather than me start a brand-new team and starting from scratch, it just made a lot of sense to ... join forces with them and shape what they were doing into what I wanted it to be." The company demonstrated a prototype unit at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1993, where attendees marveled at the console's graphical capabilities; industry analysts considered them unprecedented compared to those of contemporary consoles and personal computers.
The 3DO Company lacked the resources to manufacture consoles, and instead licensed the hardware to other companies for manufacturing. Trip Hawkins recounted that they approached every electronics manufacturer, but that their chief targets were Sony and Matsushita (now named Panasonic), the two largest consumer electronics companies in the world. However, Sony had already begun development on their own console, the PlayStation, and ultimately decided to continue work on it rather than sign with 3DO. According to former Sega CEO Tom Kalinske, The 3DO Company was engaged in very serious talks for Sega to become involved with the 3DO, though Sega ultimately passed on it due to concerns over cost. In contrast, Matsushita agreed to partner with the company as it was seeking reassurance for its investment in MCA Inc., which owned Universal Pictures and had yet to see substantial success since its acquisition by Matsushita in 1990. Matsushita launched the 3DO with its Panasonic FZ-1 model in 1993, though Goldstar (now LG) and Sanyo would later manufacture the 3DO as well. Companies who obtained the hardware license but never actually sold 3DO units include Samsung, Toshiba, and AT&T, who went so far as to build prototype AT&T 3DO units and display them at the January 1994 Consumer Electronics Show.
Licensing to independent manufacturers made the system extremely expensive. The manufacturers had to make a profit on the hardware itself, whereas most major game console manufacturers, such as Sega and Sony, sold their systems at a loss, with expectations of making up for the loss with software sales. The 3DO was priced at US$699, far above competing game systems and aimed at high-end users and early adopters. Hawkins has argued that 3DO was launched at $599, and not "higher myths that are often reported". In a later interview, Hawkins clarified that while the suggested retail price was $699, not all retailers sold the system at that price. Goldstar, Sanyo, and Panasonic's later models were less expensive to manufacture than the FZ-1 and were sold for considerably lower prices. For example, the Goldstar model launched at $399. In addition, after six months on the market, the price of the FZ-1 had dropped to $499.
Hawkins' belief was that the 3DO system could become a dominant standard in a similar way to that achieved by the VHS video cassette format, with several companies being able to promote the standard effectively against individual competitors with their own technologies. It was also believed that companies would be able to more effectively compete by being able to leverage a common standard, as opposed to having to attract developers to individual formats, with Hawkins noting that this would be "tough for Atari and Sony". Indeed, Hawkins believed that the failure of NEC to establish its TurboGrafx system, and yet being "much bigger than Sony", illustrated the difficulties faced by new entrants to the console market and thought that Sony, in following the business model of Sega and Nintendo, "would have had a better chance if it had partnered with some of the others". Meanwhile, other products were not regarded as competitive threats: the Atari Jaguar was perceived as "primitive" and "slightly better than a 16-bit system", and the Philips CD-i was regarded as "really obsolete by today's standards". Both 3DO and Philips, seeking to pioneer the broader concept of interactive entertainment, aimed to sell in the order of one million units during 1994 and into 1995.
Hawkins claimed that the console was HDTV-capable, and that the company could use its technology for a set-top box. It was believed the platform would appeal to cable companies seeking to provide digital interactive services, with broadcasts being accompanied by digital information, eventually leading to the development of video-on-demand services on what was described as a "client-server interactive network", with an interactive networking trial having been announced in collaboration with US West in Omaha, Nebraska for the autumn of 1994.
The launch of the platform in October 1993 received a great deal of attention in the press as part of the "multimedia wave" in the computer world at the time. Return Fire, Road Rash, FIFA International Soccer, and Jurassic Park Interactive had been slated for launch releases but were pushed to mid-1994 due to the developers' struggles with the then-cutting-edge hardware. Moreover, the 3DO Company made continuous updates to the console hardware almost up to the system's release, which resulted in a number of third-party titles missing the launch date, in some cases by less than a month, because the developers were not left enough time to fully test them on the finalized hardware. The only 3DO software available at launch was the third-party game Crash 'N Burn. Panasonic also failed to manufacture an ample supply of the console in time for launch day, and as a result most retail stores only received one or two units. By mid-November, the 3DO had sold 30,000 units.
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3DO
3DO is a video gaming hardware format developed by The 3DO Company and conceived by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins. The specifications were originally designed by Dave Needle and RJ Mical of New Technology Group, and were licensed by third parties; most hardware were packaged as home video game consoles under the name Interactive Multiplayer, and Panasonic produced the first models in 1993 with further renditions released afterwards by manufacturers GoldStar, Sanyo, Creative Labs, and Samsung Electronics.
Centered around a 32-bit ARM60 RISC-type processor and a custom graphics chip, the format was initially marketed as a multimedia one but this had shifted into purely video games within a year of launching. Despite having a highly promoted launch (including being named Time magazine's "1993 Product of the Year"), the oversaturated console market and the system's mixed reviews prevented it from achieving success comparable to competing consoles from Sega and Sony, leading to its discontinuation by 1996. In 1997, The 3DO Company sold its "Opera" hardware to Samsung, a year after offloading its M2 successor hardware to Panasonic.
The 3DO format was the brainchild of Electronic Arts (EA) founder Trip Hawkins; while at EA, he found himself frustrated with the limitations of developing software for different platforms that were incompatible with each other. Hawkins was inspired to create his own platform from his repeated recollection of a cartoon he saw on a wall at his previous employer, Apple Computer: it consisted of two vultures on a branch, with one suggesting to the other that they kill something instead of waiting to scavenge. Hawkins formed a unit within EA to work on the platform, but when it was spun off as The 3DO Company on September 12, 1991, he found no one willing to oversee it; he ultimately relinquished his role as chief executive of EA to oversee it himself while remaining at EA as its chairman. The 3DO name itself was an abbreviation of "three-dimensional optics", though it was also a play on the words "audio" and "video". The 3DO Company's objective was to create a next-generation, CD-based video game/entertainment standard which would be manufactured by various partners and licensees; 3DO would collect a royalty on each console sold and on each game manufactured. To game publishers, the low US$3 royalty rate per game was a better deal than the higher royalties paid to Nintendo and Sega when making games for their consoles. The 3DO hardware itself was designed by Dave Needle and RJ Mical (designers of the Atari Lynx), starting from an outline on a restaurant napkin in 1989. Trip Hawkins was a long-time acquaintance of Needle and Mical and found that their design very closely fit his philosophy for architecture and approach, so he decided: "Rather than me start a brand-new team and starting from scratch, it just made a lot of sense to ... join forces with them and shape what they were doing into what I wanted it to be." The company demonstrated a prototype unit at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1993, where attendees marveled at the console's graphical capabilities; industry analysts considered them unprecedented compared to those of contemporary consoles and personal computers.
The 3DO Company lacked the resources to manufacture consoles, and instead licensed the hardware to other companies for manufacturing. Trip Hawkins recounted that they approached every electronics manufacturer, but that their chief targets were Sony and Matsushita (now named Panasonic), the two largest consumer electronics companies in the world. However, Sony had already begun development on their own console, the PlayStation, and ultimately decided to continue work on it rather than sign with 3DO. According to former Sega CEO Tom Kalinske, The 3DO Company was engaged in very serious talks for Sega to become involved with the 3DO, though Sega ultimately passed on it due to concerns over cost. In contrast, Matsushita agreed to partner with the company as it was seeking reassurance for its investment in MCA Inc., which owned Universal Pictures and had yet to see substantial success since its acquisition by Matsushita in 1990. Matsushita launched the 3DO with its Panasonic FZ-1 model in 1993, though Goldstar (now LG) and Sanyo would later manufacture the 3DO as well. Companies who obtained the hardware license but never actually sold 3DO units include Samsung, Toshiba, and AT&T, who went so far as to build prototype AT&T 3DO units and display them at the January 1994 Consumer Electronics Show.
Licensing to independent manufacturers made the system extremely expensive. The manufacturers had to make a profit on the hardware itself, whereas most major game console manufacturers, such as Sega and Sony, sold their systems at a loss, with expectations of making up for the loss with software sales. The 3DO was priced at US$699, far above competing game systems and aimed at high-end users and early adopters. Hawkins has argued that 3DO was launched at $599, and not "higher myths that are often reported". In a later interview, Hawkins clarified that while the suggested retail price was $699, not all retailers sold the system at that price. Goldstar, Sanyo, and Panasonic's later models were less expensive to manufacture than the FZ-1 and were sold for considerably lower prices. For example, the Goldstar model launched at $399. In addition, after six months on the market, the price of the FZ-1 had dropped to $499.
Hawkins' belief was that the 3DO system could become a dominant standard in a similar way to that achieved by the VHS video cassette format, with several companies being able to promote the standard effectively against individual competitors with their own technologies. It was also believed that companies would be able to more effectively compete by being able to leverage a common standard, as opposed to having to attract developers to individual formats, with Hawkins noting that this would be "tough for Atari and Sony". Indeed, Hawkins believed that the failure of NEC to establish its TurboGrafx system, and yet being "much bigger than Sony", illustrated the difficulties faced by new entrants to the console market and thought that Sony, in following the business model of Sega and Nintendo, "would have had a better chance if it had partnered with some of the others". Meanwhile, other products were not regarded as competitive threats: the Atari Jaguar was perceived as "primitive" and "slightly better than a 16-bit system", and the Philips CD-i was regarded as "really obsolete by today's standards". Both 3DO and Philips, seeking to pioneer the broader concept of interactive entertainment, aimed to sell in the order of one million units during 1994 and into 1995.
Hawkins claimed that the console was HDTV-capable, and that the company could use its technology for a set-top box. It was believed the platform would appeal to cable companies seeking to provide digital interactive services, with broadcasts being accompanied by digital information, eventually leading to the development of video-on-demand services on what was described as a "client-server interactive network", with an interactive networking trial having been announced in collaboration with US West in Omaha, Nebraska for the autumn of 1994.
The launch of the platform in October 1993 received a great deal of attention in the press as part of the "multimedia wave" in the computer world at the time. Return Fire, Road Rash, FIFA International Soccer, and Jurassic Park Interactive had been slated for launch releases but were pushed to mid-1994 due to the developers' struggles with the then-cutting-edge hardware. Moreover, the 3DO Company made continuous updates to the console hardware almost up to the system's release, which resulted in a number of third-party titles missing the launch date, in some cases by less than a month, because the developers were not left enough time to fully test them on the finalized hardware. The only 3DO software available at launch was the third-party game Crash 'N Burn. Panasonic also failed to manufacture an ample supply of the console in time for launch day, and as a result most retail stores only received one or two units. By mid-November, the 3DO had sold 30,000 units.
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