3DO
It cost $699.99, three to four times the price of a Super Nintendo. The company that built it had no way to sell it for less.
In 1993, Trip Hawkins built a console company that built no consoles. The 3DO Company wrote a specification and licensed it out. Panasonic signed. So did Sanyo, and GoldStar. Each built its own machine, and all of them played the same discs.
The agreement settled where the money would go. Nintendo and Sega owned their factories: they could sell a console at a loss and take it back later, a few dollars at a time, out of every game sold for it. Panasonic could not. Under the licence it had signed, the royalties on 3DO games belonged to The 3DO Company, which built no machines at all. Panasonic was left with the box, and with whatever the box could earn on the day it left the shop.
The box wore a price of $699.99. A Super Nintendo cost a fraction of that, and played Mario. People stood in front of the shelf, did the arithmetic, and went home with something else.
Panasonic signed for a machine whose games would pay someone else. The price on the box was written into that agreement, years before anyone stood in front of the shelf.
3DO — at a glance
- Released
- October 4, 1993 (North America) · March 20, 1994 (Japan) · June 1994 (Europe)
- Launch price
- US$699.99 — cut to $499 within six months, then $399.99 by autumn 1994
- Makers
- Panasonic (FZ-1, FZ-10) · Sanyo (IMP-21J TRY, Japan only) · GoldStar (GDO-101M)
- Media
- CD-ROM
- Units sold
- Disputed — sources range from roughly 700,000 to 2 million worldwide
- Region
- No official region lock; Japanese and North American discs are broadly compatible
- Discontinued
- Hardware gone from shelves by the end of 1996
The machines in the line
Panasonic FZ-1
The first machine, and the one that carried the famous price. Its power-supply capacitors are the fault that defines it today.
Panasonic FZ-10
Slimmer, top-loading. Its own weak point is the laser sled, which seizes when the lubricant dries out.
Sanyo IMP-21J TRY
Sold in Japan only.
GoldStar GDO-101M
The cheapest way in, by the end. It fell to $199 in December 1995.
What actually happened
The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer reached North America on October 4, 1993, built by Panasonic as the FZ-1 under licence from The 3DO Company, which Trip Hawkins had founded after leaving Electronic Arts. Sanyo and GoldStar released their own licensed versions. In Japan, Panasonic sold the system as the 3DO REAL, launching on March 20, 1994 with around 70,000 units shipped to some 10,000 stores. The slimmer, top-loading FZ-10 followed in November 1994.
The $699.99 launch price fell to $499 within six months and to $399.99 by autumn 1994; GoldStar's machine reached $199 by December 1995. The library included Gex, Star Control II, Road Rash, The Need for Speed, Alone in the Dark, Myst, Jurassic Park Interactive and Samurai Shodown, alongside ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.
The hardware had effectively left the market by the end of 1996. Hawkins later suggested, by some accounts, that the failure came from spreading the hardware, the software and the marketing across too many companies, with no single one fully carrying the outcome. The 3DO Company itself continued as a software business for years afterwards, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy only in May 2003 — a slower ending than the console's reputation usually suggests.
The idea behind the machine
The 3DO Company set out to write a standard rather than build a product — the way VHS let many companies make machines that played the same tapes. What it did not copy was VHS's arithmetic. Here, the money from the tapes went to the company that made no machines at all.
Things worth knowing about the 3DO
- The 3DO was not a machine but a specification. Panasonic, Sanyo and GoldStar each built their own hardware to it, all running the same games — an approach closer to VHS than to a console launch.
- Controllers connected in a daisy chain: the first plugged into the console, and each one after that plugged into the back of the one before it, up to eight players from a single port.
- Japan never saw a 3DO logo on the shelf. Panasonic sold the machine there as the 3DO REAL, launching on March 20, 1994 with roughly 70,000 units across about 10,000 stores.
- The 3DO Company did not collapse when its hardware did. It kept trading as a software business for years, and filed for bankruptcy only in May 2003.
- Nobody agrees how many were sold. Published figures range from roughly 700,000 to two million worldwide, and the sources contradict each other rather than converging.
Where this leads
Thinking of buying one? What to check before you do →