3DO Interactive Multiplayer

[Anonymous No.1234309]

What went wrong?

[Anonymous No.1234324]

too expensive

[Anonymous No.1234325]

>>1234309
High price
no "system seller games"

[Anonymous No.1234341]

Pretty much no copy protection, which also helped to do in the Deamcast.

[Anonymous No.1234356]

>>1234325
>no "system seller games"
This. The only game for the system that was really good I can think of was Star Control II with voice acting, and that's open source for PC's now. Seriously though, I can't believe a game from 1994 by a small game studio has better voice acting than 95% Playstation 1 games.

[Anonymous No.1234385]

>>1234325
>no "system seller games"
Hi.

[Anonymous No.1234391]

>>1234325
>no "system seller games"

bullshit

[Anonymous No.1234393]

>>1234391

I could unironically jerk it to this game. The female is hot, and if I was gay/female, the dude would get it done for me, too.

...

I feel pathetic for typing this.

[Anonymous No.1234395]

>>1234341
How many people had a CD burner in the mid 90s?
The manufacturers wouldn't be hurt by piracy since they didn't sell the systems at a loss and didn't receive licensing revenue.

[Anonymous No.1234406]

>>1234391
I wish this was true FMV, but I suppose the low quality slideshow was part of its charm.

[Anonymous No.1234664]

>>1234406
I wish it was a straight up porn game.

[Anonymous No.1234669]

>>1234664

Considering it was self-published, they probably could have just done that and it would have been more successful.

[Anonymous No.1234691]

>>1234393
Don't feel bad, she does have some nice tits.

I bet plenty of people must've fapped to her shower scene after removing the censor.

[Anonymous No.1234707]

>>1234395
>How many people had a CD burner in the mid 90s?

I had one in late '95. It was a SCSI model that used caddies and burned at 2X. Blank CD-R's were $4-$5 each and about 20% of them would end up as coasters.

[Anonymous No.1234715]

>>1234391
To this day I regret not purchasing this game when I had the chance to.

I don't even own a 3DO, just being able to say I owned this game would be enough for me.

[Anonymous No.1234730]

Friend of mine had one, and we played the shit out of Super Street Fighter II Turbo

[Anonymous No.1235970]

>>1234385
So you are telling me you would have bought a $700 console for just need for speed ?

[Anonymous No.1236508]

I had to agree, it was expensive, and licensing..the console itself had great potential.

I still love the visual effects when playing audio cds - decent video quality in games - though the 3-D processing was something to be desired. Doom suffered on it, as well as Killing Time which as much as I like the game plot , it just played horribly because of the framerate - shame.

I also like the FZ-1 vs the FZ-10 in terms of looks .. FreeDO was the first emulator, but died out...anyone know of any others?

[Anonymous No.1236565]

It had the stigma of being a rich man's gaming machine. 700 U.S Dollars!

[Anonymous No.1236569]

Consoles are generally sold at a loss. 3do didn't manufacture their console, so it sold at cost.

[Anonymous No.1236573]

>>1236508
To elaborate by licensing I meant to say that not a whole lot of publishers were on board, a lot of good games, but mostly the price is what drove people away

>>1236565
yep this

[Anonymous No.1236581]

A couple months ago there was a 3DO at my local used game shop for $100

I was curious about it, so I put $25 away and thought I could build it up over a week or so to buy it

it was gone two days later.

[Anonymous No.1236587]

>>1234707
How much did it cost you? From what I remember from developer pamphlets from 95, a cd burner cost something like 1000$ at the time.

[Anonymous No.1236683]

>>1236508
>I still love the visual effects when playing audio cds
Same for me. 3DO was the first time I had seen an audio visualizer. I loved watching the spiraling patterns.

[Anonymous No.1236696]

Price. But out of the early 90s shit tier (Jaguar, CD-I and this), the 3DO was the best.

[Anonymous No.1236703]

The same thing killed 3DO that killed Jaguar and CDi, which is simply not enough good games. It's WAY cooler than them though. It's pretty much my favorite fail console as long as we're not counting Dreamcast.

If being expensive was enough for a platform to fail the Neo Geo would have failed

[Anonymous No.1236708]

>>1236508
4DO i think.

[Anonymous No.1237778]

>>1234309
The Zelda games for it were so good that the sheer awesomeness of seeing them stunned people into feeling unworthy up purchasing this console.

[Anonymous No.1237786]

>>1237778
>Zelda
>3DO
You're thinking of CD-i, dude.

[Anonymous No.1239276]

>>1234391
Why does this have a modern Australia rating label on it?

[Anonymous No.1239315]

>>1234324
>>1234325
>>1234341

Ahem... Allow me to explain.

The 3Do was actually the most powerful of its generation of systems. RJ Mical designed it to be cutting edge in every way, and Trip Hawkins was no fool: He knew what it took to make a console work. After all, he'd built EA, and Mical had created the Amiga's OS.

The problem from the start was that the extreme cost of the system, which was indeed prohibitive, was largely handled by the OEM 3rd parties who made the 3DO consoles. The plan, all along, was to build a specification, then make money on selling games for systems that supported this specification. There were plans for in-computer CD drives with 3DO compatibility, and for home entertainment/Internet boxes, but none of these really materialized in any meaningful way.

So Panasonic is cranking out a console, on which it has to make a profit because it doesn't make games, 3DO makes games, and other companies make games. The console itself, historically and to this day, is sold at a discount so that the first party can profit from selling its games. No one who makes a console these days doesn't make games for that console. Thus, instead of being able to sell the 3DO at a loss for say, $300, it was sold for a profit at $800.

On the other side, there were some fairly killer games for the system, by the standards of the day. Many 3D titles, like Return Fire, Star Control, Road Rash, Immercenary and PO'd were easily appealing titles to players. The Full motion video stuff never really appealed to anyone, but it did make for a flashy demo in the store, so the 3DO was not a laughing stock in the stores. It was just too expensive compared to the Playstation, which had many of the better games on the system: Need for Speed, Road Rash, PO'd, and Flashback, for example. While there were a few stand-out exclusives, (EA was an enthusiastic supporter of the console, of course, and EA still rocked back then), the 3DO didn't get as many console sales and thus died.

[Anonymous No.1239342]

>>1239315
Continued because I hit post length limit:

The second nail in the coffin was Sony's insistence upon not allowing full motion video games on their hardware. Instead, they pushed 3D as the big differentiator, and while it now seems obvious that 3D would last longer, at the time there was a massive transformation taking place in the technological side of the games business, and it caused everyone to freak the fuck out.

And by freak the fuck out, I mean they all went running in different directions, trying really weird ideas, backed by money directly funneled from Hollywood investors. It was the birth of SillyWood, and an era of intense invasion into games from the world of film.

This was all sparked by the CD. It was decided by Hollywood and Sillicon Valley that the next generation of consoles, in 1995, would be the first to act as a "Set-top box" for the whole family, instead of just for the kids. Atari totally lost out on this vision, as did Nintendo. The Saturn was too Japanese to notice, and the Playstation went entirely in the other direction, focusing on fun.

The 3DO, the CD-I, and the Apple Pippin, on the other hand, all tried to become some weird combination of game console and family-focus-point. It's why there are encyclopedia's on the CD-I, and why the Pippin came with a modem. The 3DO walked the line between these worlds and the actual game console world. It was a weird amalgam of both visions, but it was not designed that way: it was simply a function of what types of games people thought should go onto CD's. The 3DO really tried to get games, but when you're not sure what exactly a game is anymore because someone's got a videocamera all up in yer shit, it's easy to pick the wrong side of a forthcoming tech battle.

Thus, the 3DO had numerous FMV games, funded by clueless movie moguls, and built by burnt out developers who could care less how their products ended up. Everyone was convinced Myst was the greatest game ever... more

[Anonymous No.1239357]

>>1239315
>>1239342
All that autism...

Go on...

[Anonymous No.1239370]

>>1239315
Continued --
Now we have a perfect storm for failure: a console that's not really selling very well, game companies of opportunity shoveling crapware onto your platform that--for now at least--is selling and seems cool, and you've got two competitors--Sony and Sega-- beating the shit out of each other for the hard core market.

You've got to fix these problems, but how? First, you start giving a cut of the game profits to the console makers. This was a last ditch effort on the part of 3DO, and the console makers liked it, and even dropped their prices to the point where they only made a few bucks on each system.

But there were no consoles out there, already, so the profits of sold games didn't exist. And with the price drop from $800 to $600, it was still way too expensive and obscure to draw any meaningful market adoption.

In the end, yes, it was too expensive, and no, it didn't have any flagship games. But it wasn't a failure out of the gate. The lack of games was a result of lack of adoption, not lack of talent or vision. The Jaguar was the console that just sucked dicks all along and was never gonna work.

Oh, and the 3DO had copy protection. Very strong copy protection. Nothing that lasted too long after the console died, but at the time, it was never cracked, and CD burnders were wicked expensive: more expensive than the console. Piracy had no effect on the console.

OK, I am spent.

[Anonymous No.1239374]

>>1239357
Finally, it's not autism. I'm a scholar on this stuff. I teach game history, and know some of the folks I mentioned in my story.

[Anonymous No.1239412]

>>1239370
>Oh, and the 3DO had copy protection. Very strong copy protection. Nothing that lasted too long after the console died, but at the time, it was never cracked, and CD burnders were wicked expensive: more expensive than the console.

Wasn't the 3do the machine that used its own custom data track format? So all tracks were still 2352 bytes, but they used their own encoding of data instead of ISO 9660 yellow book standard. Which gave it ~800mb capacity per disc (at the time when CDs had 650mb max), but piss poor to nonexistant error protection.

[Anonymous No.1239408]

>>1239374
>I teach game history

Oh boy, video game qualifications are the new 90's internet boom.

[Anonymous No.1239432]

>>1239408
>I teach game history
You can... do that? Please anon, I implore you, tell me how this works.

wasting hours researching obscure developers and connecting the dots toward understanding the intrinsic meaning of vidya might not have been in vain after all

[Anonymous No.1239434]

>>1239408
Don't knock it- there are actual classes on this stuff. The people going to game design schools take them and even normal colleges have them sometimes.

[Anonymous No.1239440]

>game history class

That could have some interesting spins. It'd be cool to incorporate it in a business course, hopefully so that suits would understand the market before they work in it.

Of course this is all assuming that guy actually teaches this for an accredited university and isn't just referring to him spending hours researching things on the internet and attempting to school internet nerds.

[Anonymous No.1239458]

>>1239434
Yeah, there's classes on painting and photography too. Really helpful stuff.
I'm a STEM major

[Anonymous No.1239506]

>>1239412
OperaFS , other than that it was just mode1-2048 cd standard, nothing special. the discs were able to be copied , no copy protection . but the FS was proprietary (operaFS)

[Anonymous No.1239575]

>>1239458
>proper photography isn't helpful

[Anonymous No.1239587]

>>1239432
Teacher here: there are a ton of videogame colleges out there, and programs too: Full Sail, Art Academy University, Drexel, Digipen...

When learning about how to make games, it is important to learn what games came before your time, and to learn the history of the industry. This is the class I teach.

Other things they teach in game dev schools: mythology, anatomy, anthropology, biology, music history, visual art history, all manner of things....

[Anonymous No.1239592]

>>1239506
Also, remember, your cool CD burning tools that can support a dozen formats did not exist at the time...

[Anonymous No.1240382]

>>1239412
Not that I know of. It did have encryption, which was the big copy protection thing of its time: games had to have the right key to be played, and there were some tricks to make discs tough to copy, but nothing like the Saturn trick where it spins backwards, first, or the Playstations cryptic first lines of data.

[Anonymous No.1240390]

>>1239315
>plans for in-computer CD drives with 3DO compatibility
No way!

[Anonymous No.1240732]

>>1239342
>The 3DO, the CD-I, and the Apple Pippin, on the other hand, all tried to become some weird combination of game console and family-focus-point.

My god, it's like the XBone, they're doing this shit all over again!

[Anonymous No.1240749]

>>1240390

It wasnt the only console that did that. PC-FX had the same for PC-98 (I guess it was for PC-9821 models).

[Anonymous No.1240883]

>>1239506
Right, I was thinking of Jaguar CD, which used 2352 bytes per sector with non-iso data format and near to no ecc.

[Anonymous No.1241270]

>>1240883
Which is fine because no one would want to play Jaguar CD games, anyway. Not that the toilet bowls actually work anymore anyway.

[Anonymous No.1241308]

>>1239315
>>1239342
>>1239370

I knew it. I fucking knew it. Sony was the one who introduced movies to games.

[Anonymous No.1241318]

>>1241308
Blame Dragon's Lair.

[Anonymous No.1241506]

>>1241318
>>1241308

Honestly, blame Myst. It was the game that set the standard for the CD era, and like sheep, developers followed it into the world of slow-moving puzzle-based games with expensive graphics, or full motion video. Seventh Guest's success just solidified everyone's belief that FMV was the way to fill a CD.

Remember, prior to this era, games were all about being small, and optimized. Carts cost money, and ever since the Atari 2600 era, when carts were 2kb, developers had been focused very heavily on how to make their games smaller and save space. Now, we have CD's, and a game that was once $20 a piece to mass produce and took 10 megabytes of space, is now costing you 25 cents a piece to make, and can be up to 660 MB, it was kinda like the entire industry received its fondest dreams over night.

Unfortunately, space doesn't make a game better, so having more room didn't really improve game quality, it just enabled quality games to be bigger.

[Anonymous No.1241540]

>>1241506
On computers they used floppies and the developers just used more and more floppies when they needed space, even when four of those floppies were only used for the intro movie.
Not having to swap between a dozen floppies was a boon for the players as well as a price saving for the publisher.

[Anonymous No.1241539]

>>1234385
Which eventually came out on the cheaper PS1 anyway.

Honestly though, I really wanna get a 3DO someday. The lack of copyprotection is pretty enticing. I wanna play retro games that arent MUH NINTENDO all the time

[Anonymous No.1241560]

>>1241539
there are a lot of cool games out there for it, a lot did get ported over to PS and PC though. Unless you wanna play stuff like Twisted, Starfighter, Crash n Burn etc

[Anonymous No.1243230]

>>1241506
I have a theory that one of the main problems with that era, is that while storage media became a lot cheaper, ram remained very expensive throughout the entire decade - only in the very late 90s it started becoming cheaper.

This means most CD based platforms didn't have enough ram to take advantage of the extra storage space of CD media to actually improve gameplay or in-game graphics. This wasn't much of a problem for cartdrige-based platforms since they could stream data in real time.

[Anonymous No.1243308]

>>1243230
Oh, absolutely. And making matters worse, CD drives were slow as balls, and no one had invented a way to stream content off of one while a game was playing: they just load load load, play.

[Anonymous No.1243498]

>>1243308
A pretty good example of this are the Neo Geo ports on CD based consoles. The Neo Geo AES / MVS had only 148 KB of ram, but the PS1 ports, even with 2 MB of ram had to be massively downgraded... and the only reason the Neo Geo CD can run perfect AES/MVS ports is because it has a whooping 7 MB of ram (about the same as most Windows PCs at the time), too bad SNK messed up on the single speed CD drive.

One console I believe was particularly bottlenecked by the lack of ram was the Sega CD, with only 768 KB. I think that's the main reason most non-fmv games on this system look like nothing more than regular Genesis games with CD music.

[Anonymous No.1245912]

>>1235970
TNFS was released a year after the 3DO launch, which by then had received a price drop to $400 - still steep but considerably better than the $700 introductory price everyone likes to throw around. Now would I personally drop all that dosh for it? No, not really - even though I do very much like the early NFS games, but I do recall it being a bragging piece like say Soul Calibur was early on in the Dreamcast's lifespan.

>>1241539
Not for another two whole years though, after they had pretty much pulled the plug on the 3DO anyway.

[Anonymous No.1246015]

>>1234391
Is there a development story behind this on the Internet anywhere?

[Anonymous No.1247954]

>>1239315
>>1239342
>>1239370

This is why I love this board, the amount of knowledge of history.