3DO vs PlayStation: The Overlooked Console War 

😊😊awesome

The 3DO was the Xbox before the Xbox.

3do would have never made it. it was priced out of 90% of the public. the ps1 was 199 if memory serves me right. hella bettar than the 699 both yall forked over.

@@ChickenMcThiccken If memory serves me right, it only cost us $199.

$699 is STILL too expensive for a console… in 2023. lol

@@Nick_Nightingale I fully agree. Heck the PS3 had a rough start in 2006 and it was $599.

The price was pretty integral to the whole business strategy the thing was built on. There really wasn't any way it would have been affordable going with that model. Panasonic did buy the brand, so if the sequel system had come out, it probably would have been cheaper since Panasonic would have followed the traditional console business model.

Yes, kids would salivate to have one, it's just too expensive.

@mormacfey I think they will have an advantage in the movie and TV business. The trend of successful shows and movies now appears to have the momentum of video games which Sony has access to a lot of exclusives. I think that will propel them with that form of entertainment.

Sony have been really dropping the ball over recent times in gaming. Resting on their laurels from previous generations successes. Meanwhile the PS5 has just been opened up for PS5 game piracy so thats another issue they will now have to deal with.

i have , it isn't that bad and a few 3DO titles were ported to the PS1 when it launched - Gex, Total Eclipse, Offworld Interceptor.

Cagent designed 3DO hardware and played a huge role in Xbox systems after the OG.

The actual cost of living is harder now that it was in the 90's. The middle class is becoming one with the lower class. What was affordable for some might now be affordable for almost none, even "adjusted" for inflation. I've seen things become 600% more expensive over the past three years, while my wage actually decreased.

@@keilmillerjr9701 I can confirm.. back in the 90's we could afford almost anything as a middle class family. Now we're just barely scraping by, if that..

@mormacfey I don't know how they are calculating inflation, but I can tell you that it is not correct. Let's look at average things that people require. Getting rid of trash. It's up by 600% in my town over the past 3 years. 87 gasoline is up 140% over the past 3 years, and that has been slowly dropping. Same with diesel, it comes down to 150%. Food: I used to fill a carriage for the cost of $100. Now it's about $350. How about the cost of a used vehicle? Cheap ones are no longer $600. They are $3000. My motorcycle tripled in value. It's almost worth the same price it was new. Too bad it's my most reliable vehicle, and I couldn't replace it later. What's going on with rent? We are being squeezed while our wages are going down. My last job literally gave me a demotion, because corona? They provided no excuse, while making the most amount of money they ever have.

Exactly. I was born in 82 and nobody had a 3do. I've never even seen one in person. 😂

Did he ever consider it?

It would have been forgotten. The best game on a failed console rarely becomes a massive hit that lasts for decades.

Or there would be 4-5 companies vs 3

​@@droneadventures4147The 3do had one 12.5mhz cpu.

​@@yearight5303and if you were to read both of you alls comments: he mentioned GPU, you tried to correct him talking about CPU. They're not the same piece.

Exactly. Marketing had little to do with its failure. It was the price.

@mormacfey Phillips CD-I also failed because of the price ($700 just like the 3DO) and complete lack of decent games.

@mormacfey But they weren't PCs nor advertised as such. They were multimedia gaming consoles.

Yeah, and imagine the kind of stuff we could have seen if 3DO had 3rd parties like Konami, Capcom, Squaresoft, Enix, and Sunsoft developing games for them. If the price was more reasonable and they had 3rd parties like that on board, they may have actually dominated that generation despite being the weakest console overall. One generation later, the PS2 showed us that it's really all about the games library more then anything else (although DVD playback was also a huge factor in it's success.)

@@JMFSpike The graphics potential of the system was quite underestimated. I think Space Hulk was the best showcase of the hardware, but still below potential.

yes! I spent an entire summer playing Star Control 2. Not sure how I beat it in the days before internet...well before I had internet

​​@@Valthonis- It's nice that this has been ported to modern computers and Android with optional HD graphics as freeware, also the original devs are FINALLY working on a true sequel to it...

@@JohnnyProctor9 wait what? there is a real sequel in works? dang, that's amazing news!

Wow, you knew someone who owned a 3DO. Didn't know anybody who had one of the "also running" consoles in the day

@@napoleonfeanor Yup it was only this one person I knew and he was aggresive about getting us all over to see it in action.

Was the same in my town. There was always the one guy with lots of money who made a big show of buying those consoles before anyone else. He had the 3DO and showed it off like crazy. None of us had his deep pockets so we just gawked at it. The guy loved the attention and was rather smug about it. Then the Playstation launched and his 3DO was forgotten. He had to go get a Playstation like everyone else except everyone else had them. He got no bragging out of it.

Even the war between the PS1 and N64 was pretty uneven considering Sony outsold Nintendo 3-1. It was even worse the next gen with PS2 doing 150 million while Gamecube not even selling 25m. Even the og Xbox outsold the GC.

A bit revisionist there and unfair to consoles/gaming. Beyond the realities of consoles outputting to standard definition interlaced TV, sure, over in the PC space, EGA/VGA had featured high-res modes since the late 80s, and 800x600 and 1024x768 SVGA resolutions existed for productivity and CAD work...but gaming was still predominantly 320x200 until the mid 90s. And 1024x768 in the early 90s often meant a headache-inducing 42i CRT refresh with single-digit fps. Sure you had your hi-res 640x480 SVGA outliers by 93-94, particularly CD-ROM titles like The 7th Guest and Myst and Wing Commander 3, but certainly PC gaming in 320x200 was the norm when the 3DO and PSX came out, look at the big 94-95 games like Descent, Doom 1+2, Dark Forces and Command and Conquer. And while WC3 on PC was higher res, the 3DO could eg. boast 16-bit colour rather than 8-bit. Even once Quake hit in 96, 3D accelerators like the Voodoo 1 and Rendition Verite were 640x480 cards, the first 3D cards capable of even 800x600 (3dfx Voodoo 2, NVIDIA RIVA 128) didn't really launch until late 97-early 98. 1024 PC gaming just barely made the tail end of the 90s, not the beginning of it and consoles, even the 3DO but certainly the PSX, punched well above their weight for their price until then.

@mormacfey​​⁠ In 1994, people were running games like Doom 2 at 320x240 resolution on their PCs. Most PCs didn’t even any have any graphics acceleration at that point and it was mostly 2D games that used 640x480 resolution.

@mormacfey I don’t know what you were using, but in 1994 most gamers were playing 3D games on their PCs at 320x200 resolution.

Not true...the exclusive talkie versions of Star Control II and Sherlock Holmes weren't, neither were Lost Eden, Robinson's Requiem, Corpse Killer, Guardian Wars, Killing Time, Zhadnost, Way of the Warrior, or DinoPark Tycoon. Also the PS1 port of Off-World Interceptor was censored and the PS1 port of Space Hulk had the graphics and AI nerfed...

@@GremmPaltakin - For the most part yes, I've owned both versions of Road Rash and Wing Commander III and honestly can't tell the difference.

Out of the 3DO Jaguar and pc engine the pc engine is the best one out of the group :)

If you think 3do need for speed is "barely outperforming" svp or fx, you are severely lacking intellect

I don't know about the 3DO, but on the Playstation high resolution interlaced graphics became common in 3D fighting games (Dead or Alive, Tobal 2, Tekken 3).

Saturn version came out a year later.

I was thinking the same thing. I was around at that time and I never heard of a war between them; not even in the gaming mags did you hear about a war. The 3DO was highly expensive, it cost like maybe 200 dollars more than the ps1. There was a war (competitively) between Sony, Nintendo and Sega. Sony came out with the Playstation, Sega released the Saturn, and Nintendo with their 64 bit system. A few years after that, the Saturn was dying off, about the only ones making games for the Sega Saturn was sega, but the PS1 was going strong with lots of developers developing games for it And then all 3 released their new game systems; Sega beat them to the punch and released the Sega Dreamcast before the others in hopes of getting a larger market share, BUT shoppers avoided the Dreamcast like the plague, and waited patiently for the Playstation 2 to arrive. And so....the Sega Dreamcast died a quick death. And so there were 2 left --- the Nintendo GameCube and the Sony Playstation 2. A few years later, Microsoft saw an opportunity to get into the gaming business, and the rest is history. 3DO? Nope, I had Playstation, my friend had a Nintendo 64, but no one had a 3DO or a Dreamcast 🤷