
The 3DO: The birth of my cynicism - smacktoward
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KeithBurgun/20171218/311849/The_3DO_The_birth_of_my_cynicism.php
======
cortesoft
I don't quite follow the point the author is trying to make. He had an
experience where something he paid a bunch for turned out to be nearly
worthless, so now he hates all video games? But not really, he just doesn't
like the industry?

It sounds to me like he is just cynical in general. I am mid-thirties, have
been playing video games since the 80s, and still love them with the same
enthusiasm as when I was a kid.

Sure, I play a lot less. I don't have nearly as much time, with a full time
job, a wife, and a kid. It is still my go-to free time activity, though.

My buddies, married with children themselves, and I play together online one
night a week. It is our way of maintaining our social bond through families
and living far apart. We are closer because of games than we would ever be
otherwise.

~~~
christoph
I bought loads of silly machines over the years - CD32, CDTV, CDi, 3DO,
Jaguar...

It feels a little bit like we are in a little golden age of video games.

I’ve just finished up BotW (amazing), maybe 50% through Mario Odyssey (amazing
again), I’ve got Rayman Legends to play through and Splatoon 2 to get stuck
into, in between the odd game of Rocket League. That’s just on the Switch!

On the PC I’ve got countless games I’ve bought for next to nothing in steam
sales to find time for, Cuphead, Just Cause 3, Metro, Wolfenstein to finish
and highly acclaimed indy titles galore...

Then I have tons of retro games I’m eager to play for the first time, or play
through again, easily accessed and for next to nothing.

My biggest complaint is also the lack of time I have to digest it all.

~~~
stinkytaco
Is it a golden age, or do games get generally better as technology improves?
They are bigger, smoother, more complex, better connected, and so on. That's
why I don't quite follow this article either. Games are _objectively_ better.
Perhaps he doesn't find them as fun or as engaging, but that's less to do with
the games and more to do with the person.

That and the DS/3DS is probably the richest game console to date in terms of
sheer volume of quality content. If you can't find a game you like on the DS,
you might not like games.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
This is highly subjective so probably some people will strongly disagree, but
I do think there have been significantly better and worse "ages" in
videogames. It's not been constant progress.

For example, I'd say 1999-2005 was a quite crappy age. Dominant consoles were
Playstation 1 and 2, the first XBox and the Game Cube, which of course had
some fine outlier games but nothing compared to the mind-blowing catalogs of
e.g. the SNES or the Neo Geo, which were brimming with gems, many of them are
still widely considered among the best games of all time.

In the PC, after breakthrough games in the previous years like Daggerfall,
Quake, Master of Magic, Doom, Civ II, Ultima Underworld, Fallout, Warcraft,
Starcraft, GTA, etc., most of what dominated the market in that decadence
period were sequels of those and others, and unoriginal games.

This opinion is not just due to my being a cranky old timer wanting people to
get off his lawn. I do think the situation improved a lot from 2006 onwards.
Team Fortress II, the Wii, Portal, Minecraft... were truly revolutionary
concepts in the late 2000s in different ways, and indie games began to
flourish with titles like World of Goo or Braid (or said Minecraft). Fast
forward to now, and we have the Switch, Pokémon Go (geolocation games), and a
blooming indie universe. I do think we are at a golden age, it would be a
great time to be 15 again and have lots of time for videogames.

~~~
inertiatic
I find that statements like this serve only to reflect the writer's nostalgia.

The Playstation/Saturn/N64 generation wasn't even mentioned despite being the
one to introduce 3D games which are still being perfected and laying the
foundation for the mechanics that are still the basis of almost every single
game coming out today.

~~~
Apocryphon
And perhaps it's fueled by nostalgia, but games like Super Mario 64 and Final
Fantasy VII are still acclaimed today despite their aged tech and the creation
of better successors. And in some ways they are timeless, in the same ways NES
or Atari classics are.

------
tsunamifury
Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Neo-Geo, and WebOS and other assorted platform failures
along with the successes of OSX, Android, iOS, Xbox, psx, and nintendo left a
strong imprint on why and how I develop software platforms. I learned you
can’t just promise radical new opportunities, you have to have them ready and
usable on launch day. This allows users to buy in on day one and be generally
happy. Then this motivates third party developers which then snowballs into
more users and then the platform achieves takeoff velocity.

Ultimately all successful platforms are a collective ecosystem experience, but
they start just between the user and the first party developer.

Teams like Occulus are falling down the same trap as 3DO, promising lots of
new expertise’s but demonstrating little to no day-one practicality.

~~~
monksy
> promising lots of new expertise’s but demonstrating little to no day-one
> practicality.

That exactly describes why I can't stand the MVP trend.

~~~
bbarn
The V is for viable, but too many people seem to never get past the M.

~~~
monksy
Oh no, they totally get the minimal part.

------
detcader
This sort of story just happened en masse with Destiny 2 players. The game
($60) as a social multiplayer space kind of hit a dead end after everyone beat
the campaign, with further milquetoast content gated behind DLC and loot boxes
(all paid of course)

The whole thing of children being socially incentivized to invest huge amounts
of money in devices that might fail for fear they'll be out of the loop with
children slightly richer than them is a huge bummer. This problem doesn't
really exist for TV, movies, books, and card and board games. I'm starting to
wonder if PC and mobile gaming really should win out against Nintendo and
Sony, morally...

Another good personal story about how we interface with videogame:
[https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/12/15958318/the-5000-decision...](https://www.polygon.com/2017/7/12/15958318/the-5000-decision-
to-get-rid-of-my-past)

~~~
stinkytaco
There was a time when card games were about how much money you had rather than
how good you were. Many games have introduced rotation, which has helped, but
it's still an ongoing investment in the game and it's still a few hundred just
to be competitive on Magic night at your local shop. But they did find the
balance point that seems fair. I think video games haven't found that yet.

I'm really torn on DLC, game expansions and the like. On one hand, $60 for a
new game every year is lots when I could spend $25 on a game I already enjoy.
But on the other, it's an excuse to limit content up front in order to milk
users. I think it's a matter of perception and companies that find a fair
balance will be successful.

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
Continuously buying booster packs is only a problem only with games like
Magic.

There are lots of card games where you just buy a base set and an expansion
now and again. And the vast majority of board games don’t require constant
investment.

~~~
slantyyz
I bought Dropmix for my niece for Christmas. It's an NFC-based card game made
by Harmonix and Hasbro. It's actually an interesting music mixing game that
works really well... but..

While it comes with 60 cards, the biggest criticism that I've seen about the
game is how expensive the booster kits are and how they are packaged. To get
all aspects of a song, you may have to buy multiple booster packs. I get that
the song rights are built into the cost, but they cost as much or more than
individual songs do off iTunes, and one card usually has only one part of a
song (i.e. vocals, guitar, percussion, etc).

~~~
2muchcoffeeman
I was thinking more like Arkham Horror, or Android: NetRunner.

Not to be gender normative, but that probably doesn’t help you.

~~~
stinkytaco
With netrunner I'm not continually buying packs, but rather data sets and
expansions. Plus with rotation I need to keep that up. There's no randomness,
but there is ongoing cost.

------
vidoc
It's not just well written, it's actually quite ballsy too as I am currently
acknowledging to myself how I would never ever have the courage to come clean
and come up with a blog post explaining how I bought the Atari Jaguar in the
90s, and ended up basically in the same situation.

------
perfmode
> It really is kind of irresponsible and sort of dumb in a way to buy a
> console really early in its lifespan. But maybe that's what it is to like
> things. Being a little bit dumb - believing in something, even when maybe
> you know you shouldn't.

So true.

------
brians
The author shows us how he felt, and tells us “this is what it’s like to like
things.”

But that doesn’t seem right at all. I like reading books, and I like watching
some shows and playing video games. I’m not invested in _owning_ them, or in
the community experience of watching what everyone else recently has. This is
what it’s like to define your identity by what you own and by what you
participate in. Like a Cubs fan, maybe—you can do that, and you can care about
winning, and you can care about having popular opinions, but maybe you should
pick one of those three.

------
sametmax
Reading the title I though it would be talking about 3D0, the team behind
Heroes of Might and Magic, and how they screw up the HOMM3 steam remake
because they lost the source code.

I could have related since it's one of my favorite game ever :)

------
cdevs
On the other end of this emotional spectrum I have always loved watching games
evolve with me and what you think is now the best is kids stuff compared to
what comes next. Mortal kombat and doom enraged parents at the time and now
the stuff we can render at 60+ frames a second would blow people away in the
80s. Part software evolution and part hardware coming together each year to
push the envelope, more sprites, more triangles more pixels more frames. I can
afford whatever system I want now but when I was a kid a 180$ sega was like
winning the lottery.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> now the stuff we can render at 60+ frames a second would blow people away in
> the 80s

It _has_ blown away people who got started on '80s hardware. In particular,
I'm pretty sure that Jeff Minter has made comments specifically saying how
amazed he was at the sheer per-pixel computational power on the Xbox 360.

------
mmjaa
I remember a time when the only way to play video games on my computer was, if
I programmed them myself. Like, there literally wasn't any other way .. the
system I'd chosen to hang my chops on (Oric-1/Atmos) wasn't that well
supported by the nascent industry at the time, and so .. it was either write
my own shit, or forget about it.

So, I grew up a coder.

While, in the meantime, my C64- and Amiga- using friends, with all their
amazing software choices, didn't have to do anything but consume, consume,
consume. And, eventually, "upgrade to a Nintendo" for their gaming needs.

See kids, this is what happens when you ship computers that no longer have
development tools/compilers/REPL's onboard!

Seriously though, I think the "3DO Moment" for me was when I realised I always
preferred to spend time with computers if there was a compiler onboard, or
some other way to build software for the thing. Anything less is just a door
opener.

------
et1337
Some video games are great. Video game culture is... not great. I think this
guy is upset with the culture and companies in gaming rather than the games
themselves. Surprised he didn't say anything about loot boxes.

~~~
detcader
He did say that many games are great on their own. But isn't it an inherent
feature of console gaming itself, that young people need to invest tons of
money to keep up with their peers, taking on the potential risk of the
console's failure?

~~~
toast0
So, I think there's a couple ways to look at it.

If you have (nearby) friends who play, and you're dealing with physical games;
if you get a console around when they do, you can share newer games and reduce
the risk of buying terrible games at full price. You'll probably buy some of
the great games at full price so you can do multiplayer games though.

If you don't hang out with people who play, you can just buy a year late, and
get the benefit of lower prices, more finished games, and a clear indication
of what's cool and what isn't. You might miss out on online
features/community, but that really depends.

Was it stupid to buy the 3DO for $700? Probably. But, it wasn't much more than
the Neo Geo home console, and the games were probably cheaper?

------
kodablah
Was just reading about the 3DO because I was gonna write an emulator.
Wikipedia and others point to steep price tag, the spec-only-third-party
hardware approach, and that they didn't collect many royalties from the games
as the reasons for the downfall of the 3DO. But as I looked around and read,
it seemed they were super proud and stingy with the tech (expensive devkits
iirc), and the tech was about 2 years too early and just a bit before the 3D
revolution that came with 5th gen consoles.

~~~
MBCook
There’s just no getting around the price. It was (inflation adjusted) $1200
plus games.

Remember when gamers were upset the PS3 was $600 even though it was also a
Blu-ray player? Remember when the Xbox One tripped out of the gate because it
was $500 and not $400 like the PS4?

$1200.

There were other mistakes. You’re right development was expensive. It wasn’t
as powerful as the PS and Saturn that came later much cheaper (the Saturn was
also considered too expensive at $400... which was $300 less than the 3DO).
They didn’t have pre-built franchises to lean on like Mario or Sonic.

But MAN was it expensive.

~~~
slantyyz
It didn't have Mario or Sonic, but looking back, you could argue that it laid
the foundation of next generation of EA (like 'em or hate 'em) titles.

FIFA and Road Rash were vastly better on the 3DO than they were on 16 bit
machines at the time. I remember being in awe of how great FIFA was on the
3DO, and the 3DO version of Road Rash was easily my favorite version of that
game.

If I'm not mistaken, Need for Speed was first introduced on the 3DO. I
remember there being quite a few good games on 3DO (mostly from EA and Crystal
Dynamics), including what might have been the closest thing to an arcade
version of Super Street Fighter 2 turbo.

But yeah, the 3DO was ridiculously expensive. Having said that, so was the Neo
Geo home console. I had a few friends who were really into the SNK 2d fighting
games at the time, and they'd be plunking well over $100 per cartridge.

~~~
MBCook
It was affectively EA’s console, they tried to support it well. And it was
obviously WAY more powerful than the 16 bit machines.

NeoGeo at least had an argument, it was literally an arcade board you could
buy at home. To the group of gamers who wanted that stuff there was a strong
reason for it to exist and an explanation for its cost.

If they had gotten a couple of killer titles maybe it could’ve done better. Or
if the price had fallen faster before the system was declared “dead“ by the
public. But by the time that happened it was just too late.

$700 was three SNESes and a game or two at the SNES launch price. But this was
three years later so you could probably buy a few more games.

It was just an obscene amount of money, especially for what was still
considered a “kids toy” until more into the PS2 and XBox.

~~~
slantyyz
IIRC, I grabbed the 3DO in 1995 for around $500 CAD (and the dollar was weak
against the USD at that point). This was just prior to the North American
release of the Saturn and PS1. It's been so long but I think I got a Japanese
import of the PS1 prior the North American release for about the same money a
month or two after getting the 3DO. At the time, a friend and I had opened up
a video game shop, and until the PS1 releases really started ramping up, the
3DO games were actually pretty popular with the kids who came into our store.

~~~
MBCook
I remember seeing them in stores before and after the PlayStation came out. I
was always kind of interested in it and liked playing with Gex some of the
other games, but it was totally academic because I knew that even after price
drops ($500, or $400) it was never going to happen for me.

------
zmonkeyz
For $750 bucks you did get an arguably perfect version of SF2 Super Turbo. For
my friends and I that was amazing.

------
Pica_soO
It would be interesting if this could be quantified into a hard number- the
damage hype does to the overall market, by disillusioning players.Seems
marketing is not a victimless crime after all.

