3DO Interactive Multiplayer Review

Trip Hawkins left Electronic Arts to build a console the way a standards body builds one: 3DO drew up the design and licensed it to manufacturers, so Panasonic's FZ-1 was the first of several boxes running identical discs. The engineering is real. An ARM processor, two custom graphics chips, a double speed CD drive and 32 bit output in 1993 put it a clear generation ahead of the Genesis, and the good software shows it.

Star Control II is one of the finest games of the decade and this is the version with the voices. Road Rash is the one people remember. The Need for Speed started here. Return Fire, Gex and the Japanese release of Policenauts all earned the hardware they ran on. Then there is the price. Panasonic asked $699 at launch, at a moment when a Genesis with a game in the box cost under $150, for a platform with no first party studio and no exclusive a family had heard of.

Publishers filled the disc space with full motion video, so the shelves carried grainy actors instead of games, and whatever advantage the hardware held evaporated when Sony shipped a PlayStation at $299. 3DO gave up on hardware in 1996, sold the follow up technology to Matsushita and became a publisher. It is a genuinely interesting machine and there was never a single week in which it was the sensible purchase.