3DO Interactive Multiplayer

» see 3do.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i never saw a 3do. in 1993 i was nine years old, our street had famiclones and rented sega master systems at the corner shops, and a seven hundred dollar american console was not a category that existed locally. the 3do was a fifth-generation machine that lived its entire commercial life in the english-speaking press. the rest of the world heard about it after the fact.

trip hawkins stepped away from electronic arts in 1991 to build it. the idea was to license console specs to multiple manufacturers the way audio formats get licensed. panasonic, goldstar, sanyo and creative labs all shipped their own 3do hardware against a single software library. it launched in north america on october 4 1993 at $699.99, was named time magazine's product of the year, and immediately ran into the math problem hawkins himself later admitted was fatal. licensees needed margin. sony was about to ship playstation at $299 by taking a loss on hardware and recouping it on software royalties. 3do could not match that price without killing the licensing model.

the console moved roughly two million units worldwide and was effectively dead by late 1996. the planned m2 successor never shipped. matsushita and the other licensees walked away. the 3do company spent the back half of the decade selling itself off in pieces and filed for bankruptcy in 2003. the cultural footprint is night trap, road rash on cd, gex, and a "product of the year" plaque that aged into a wikipedia footnote.

~ the case file ~

~ the licensed-hardware bet ~

the licensing model was the whole pitch. hawkins did not want to manufacture anything. he wanted to be the dolby of consoles, sell the standard and collect a royalty while panasonic and goldstar fought over who built the cheapest box. this works for media formats. it does not work for game consoles, which need hardware sold at a loss to drive software sales. nobody in the licensee pool was willing to lose money on a console they did not control. sega had tried losing money on master system in 1986 because sega owned the platform. matsushita was not going to lose money on a platform it did not own.

~ the slide ~

the saturn launched ten months later for less money. the playstation launched twelve months after that for less money still. each one had stronger third-party support because each had a single first-party publisher behind it. the 3do had no first party at all. ea was the closest thing, since hawkins had founded ea, but ea also shipped its biggest titles on snes and genesis where the actual customers were. by 1995 every multi-platform release that mattered was on the systems with the bigger install base, which was every system except 3do.

~ the long tail ~

the m2 chipset was eventually sold to matsushita and used inside arcade hardware and a japanese vending-machine system. nobody played those games at home. trip hawkins started a new company called digital chocolate in 2003, the same year the 3do company filed for bankruptcy. 3do today is a name that surfaces in retro-collector circles, mostly because the surviving panasonic fz-1 units look like a piece of audio equipment and photograph well.

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