3DO

Here come some absolutely gross assumptions guaranteed to make experts wince. The Mega Drive and SNES are commonly referred to as part of the fourth generation of consoles, but in the UK it was the second generation at best. The eighties were dominated by 8-bit computers, not consoles. It was only really as the eighties ended that Virgin Mastertronic began to have some success selling the SEGA Master System. Around the same time, home grown companies had a go at cracking the console marker. Konix really tried to be a contender with the Multisystem in 1989. Amstrad had a go with the GX4000 console in 1990. But nobody cracked it because consoles didn't break into the wider public consciousness until the period kickstarted by the release of Tetris for the Game Boy, in September 1990, and consolidated by the June 1991 release of Sonic the Hedgehog. That's when the UK market became ripe for plucking.

None of this made any difference to the big international companies, of course. Except to convince them the UK market was worth dealing with directly. Hence, SEGA moving in, Nintendo moving in, Sony moving in, and so on. Whereas previously they dealt with third party distributors like Virgin Mastertronic for SEGA and Mattel for the Nintendo NES. At the same time, as technology changed and the CD-ROM became a better and cheaper alternative to cartridges, the market looked like it might fracture. Suddenly the future was up for grabs and didn't have to be dominated by Nintendo or SEGA. Commodore were first with the Amiga CD32. Atari chanced their arm with the Jaguar. Sony had this thing in development called the PS-X.  Which is where the 3DO enters the picture.

The 3DO console was the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, founder and chief executive of Electronic Arts. There are better places to read about the history. The short version, Trip Hawkins was frustrated by the fragmented nature of the computer and console market and the work it took to convert between different home computers and consoles. His idea was to replace stand alone systems with a standard; think VHS, different companies making machines to read the same magnetic media. Trip Hawkins' company would licence the rights to build consoles and collect a royalty on each machine sold, with the same sort of deal applying to software.

Thus was the 3DO Company founded. Trip Hawkins stepped down as chief executive of EA to become CEO of 3DO; OK? No fool, he kept one foot in the EA camp by staying on as chairman. The 3DO was popular with games companies because cost of a licence to make software was less than the one charged by Nintendo or SEGA. The Achilles' heel of the system was the outsourcing of manufacturing the consoles themselves. Nintendo and SEGA used income from game licences to offset the losses caused by selling their systems at less than the manufacturing cost. The 3DO hardware manufacturers couldn't do this. They had to make their money back on each unit sold because they didn't see any of the software licence money. The result, when the Panasonic launched their 3DO in America it was on sale for $699 in October 1993; that's about $1500 now. The price hadn't come down appreciably by September 1994 when the Panasonic F-Z1 [1] went on sale  in the UK. You could buy a Mega Drive and three games for £99.99 or a SNES and Street Fighter II Turbo for £109.99 or a 3DO and Total Eclipse for £399.95 [2]. 

YORK STAR
22 December 1994 page 22

The 3DO failed. It got a lot of attention because it was an early 32-bit console, at a time when the dominant machines were 16-bit [3]. EDGE was an early supporter, as you'd expect, but as early as July 1994 they ran an interview with Trip Hawkins and headlined the cover with the caption "3DOA?" [4]. 

EDGE
July 1994

COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES gave the console a big write up in the August 1993 issue and ran a supplement called TEKNO for several [5] issues from October 1994. Paragon Publishing produced the UK's only dedicated 3DO magazine, called 3DO MAGAZINE. There was a similarly titled magazine released in Japan. Both broadly published across 1994 and into 1996.

 Even before the 3DO console launched in the UK, news leaked of a new 64-bit follow up. EDGE spilled the details in their September 1994 issue. The new machine was codenamed Bulldog and scheduled to launch for Christmas 1995. It was cheaper than the system that hadn't gone on sale yet. The consolation prize for anyone who did drop £400 on an already out of date 3DO was that they only needed to pay another £75 for an upgrade cartridge.

How many 3DOs sold in the UK? No one really knows. When EDGE interviewed Trip Hawkins in July 1994 he estimated worldwide sales as "approaching 100,000" and by the end of the year 3DO issued a press release announcing that sales were closing in on the 500,000 mark. The PlayStation, in it's first nine months on sale in America, sold 1 million units. Wikipedia estimates total worldwide 3DO sales at 1.38 to 2 million. That's less than the number of PlayStations sold in Europe in the first year.

There's a lot of information online about the 3DO but the pool of knowledge is broad, not deep. Most of it comes from that early enthusiastic period around the end of 1994 and the archive later gets spottier and more inconsistent. It's not even easy to tell what games made it to the shops. C&VG goes to Bootle in October 1994 (page 16), to talk to Rage Software about their 3DO version of Striker. Did it get released? Probably. It is reviewed by 3DO MAGAZINE in April 1995 where they give it a five star score and list the publisher and price as TBA, and the release date as May. There are videos of it being played on Youtube so it must have made it to the shops somewhere but if I time travelled back to 1995 could I pick up a copy from Electronics Boutique? The second issue of 3DO Magazine started a column called 3DO World in which they highlighted games available on import from Japan. The first two games featured? Microcosm and Novastorm, by Psygnosis. Likewise that Youtube video for Striker: World Cup Special shows the publisher was a Japanese company called Coconuts Japan at a time when, in the UK, Rage games were mainly being published by GT Interactive. Perhaps it's only natural that software companies favoured Japan. The 3DO had a lot of success there. EDGE (April 1995 page 10) printed sales figures showing sales of 365,000 units by the end of 1994; with many of these off the back of Super Street Fighter II Turbo. There was a thriving import market into the UK because 3DO games were not region locked. The downside of this was to drive down game sales in the UK and I can't help feeling it's a bad sign two of the UK's biggest software companies were apparently not distributing their own games in the UK. 

THE GUARDIAN
14 January 1995 page 216

Richmond Bridge House, 419 Richmond Road, Twickenham UK, TW1 2EX

What do I know in this morass of doubt and uncertainty? I know from Companies House that 3DO Europe (company number 02957052) was founded on 09 Aug 1994 and dissolved on 28 Sep 2004. Thanks to a recruitment advert in THE GUARDIAN I know they were based in Twickenham.

Right. Let's go and have a look.

March 2026

Richmond Bridge House is looking empty and neglected at the moment. Hopefully someone will be along soon to move in.

The autumn of 1995 saw 3DO unveil a new advertising campaign. The "Don't Play A Dodo," slogan used at the top of the page. The campaign was designed by the agency BDDH and, according to 3DO Magazine, there were also:

Trade ads urging retailers to sell 3DO because it's not due for dodo-style extinction. 'dodo n., pi, dodos or dodoes.

1. any flightless bird, esp. of the recently extinct family Raphidae.

2. Any 16-bit or non-upgradeable 32-bit games consoles, (adj.).' 

Call me Mr. Sceptical but I don't think this is a very good slogan. I don't think it's possible to mention a product and a dodo in the same advert without people making the wrong association. I particularly don't think you want to associate an extinct flightless bird with the 3DO console. Especially not when, at the end of 1995, the 3DO Company sold the rights for the M2 Bulldog technology to Panasonic [6]. The original plan was for 3DO to continue to develop the M2 and just sell Panasonic the rights to issue licences to other companies but somewhere along the line this changed. Panasonic brought the M2 project wholesale in October 1996. In the UK, the 3DO market didn't make it past Christmas 1996. The M2 project itself never made it to shops and was cancelled in 1997.

3DO produced games, as well as consoles, and after the Panasonic sale they stopped supporting the machine they had created and moved on to the PlayStation and PC. They produced a couple of well know series; notably Might and Magic, after they acquired the company who made those games, and Army Men. 

Army Men is mentioned in issue twelve of 3DO MAGAZINE, listed as coming soon for the M2 machine: 

STUDIO 3DO
Army Men
A Command & Conquer mix of arcade action with tactical-strategic gameplay. 

The M2 version obviously didn't make it didn't make it but other versions did. Army Men was partially created to get round Germany's strict censorship rules on videogame violence but it can't have hurt that those little plastic soldiers featured in Toy Story, and required no licence because they were a generic toy. The Army Men series stretched out to 18 games before The 3DO Company went into bankruptcy in May 2003. 

21-23 Mossop Street, London, SW3 2LY

I don't know when 3DO moved from Richmond Bridge House to Mossop Street. You may, or may not, be surprised to hear this. An educated guess is that it occurred some time after Christmas 1995 because of an editorial reply to a letter in issue 12 of 3DO MAGAZINE:

Unfortunately, after Xmas many companies switched their focus to PlayStation, GoldStar pulled out of the console market, Panasonic and Studio 3DO cut back their European offices.

Mossop Street is very nice. A quiet little London backwater, midway between Sloan Square and South Kensington underground stations. When did 3DO move there? I don't know. I don't think they were there in 1995/96 when Namco Europe was based next door at 25-27. 3DO were in Mossop Street by 2001, when OFFICIAL UK PLAYSTATION 2 MAGAZINE printed this list of contact addresses for publishers in issue 4. About a year later, 3DO released a statement announcing the London office would close, IGN reported:

The London office, based at 21-23 Mossop Street, will close on Friday June 21, 2002, but a European licensing, accounting and UK and European back catalogue sales function will continue to be maintained

I found a couple of recruitment adverts for this address in 2000, so 3DO Europe had two to three years at Mossop Street and then it got in another move before dissolution in 2004.

March 2026

 9Z Upper Aughton Road, Southport, Merseyside, PR9 9UZ

The Wayback Machine has an incomplete archive of the 3DO Europe website (it looks like it was a Flash-filled monstrosity, so the archive copy doesn't work very well these days). There are a few interesting things to be discovered in the bits of the website that still work. 

Thing one: the About 3DO section states the company was incorporated in May 1999 (which doesn't make a lick of sense) but it goes on to add the company is:

Headed up by Dominic Wheatley and Robert McGrath

Robert McGrath seems to have worked a lot with Virgin Interactive Entertainment and Dominic Wheatley can only be the founder of Domark and Eidos. I didn't know he worked for 3DO.

Thing two: The Press Area takes you to the archived main 3DO website. Among the various press releases about financing and Army Men and Heroes of Might and Magic, there's one dated 9 July 2002 with the headline 3DO Saves Millions with Facilities Moves.

The 3DO Company (Nasdaq: THDO) today announced that it has completed moves into less expensive facilities in both the U.S. and the U.K., resulting in total operating cash flow savings of more than $6 million in the company's Fiscal 2003 ending in March, 2003 and expected savings of nearly $18 million from FY2003 through FY2006. The company's total lease obligations were reduced by more than $60 million....

The company's new addresses are 200 Cardinal Way, Redwood City, California, 94063, U.S.A., and 9Z Upper Aughton Road, Southport, Merseyside, PR99UZ, U.K.

Southport is just up the coast from Liverpool. Merseyside is not an illogical place for a new office. Sony still maintained a big presence in Liverpool, Rage Software were there, and the city had a wealth of talent and smaller developers. It was potentially a sensible location for a software publisher. However this isn't just the point where common sense leaves town, it zooms off for the horizon in the fastest car it can find. This is number nine Upper Aughton Road. It's a small two story shop, later converted into two flats, 9 and 9A. Er, what? If there is a 9Z today, I can't find it. Streetview offers no clues. There are some houses round the back which look post-1990s. Maybe 9Z was there and later demolished. Maybe, in 2002, whatever business was based at 9 Aughton road in 2002 offered a mailbox service. I could believe 9Z was a mistyped 92, except the address also appears in an earlier press release.

I can't begin to describe how weird this is. It's 220 miles from London to Stockport. Who in 3DO Europe, or the 3DO Company in California, decided to move the business to this address. Who ran it Where did they find it? Why did this seem like a good place? What was their thinking?  How did a company founded by Trip Hawkins to take on SEGA and Nintendo end up here?

3DO Magazine

Published by Paragon out of Durham House, 124 Old Christchurch Road, Bournemouth, BHl INF. 3DO MAGAZINE ran for 14 (or possibly 15) issues between 1994 and 1996, and pretty much covers the life of the 3DO in the UK from initial optimism to eventual failure. 

Issue one carried the vague cover date of Winter 1994 and established the format the magazine would keep for most of its life. Your £4.99 brought a 68 page magazine and a cover disc full of demos; although, as one reader pointed out in issue two, the disc was a "3DO sampler disc released in the US more than six months ago". One of the things I find really interesting about 3DO MAGAZINE is how willing it was to go into the behind the scenes business decisions which are normally hidden from the reader. The same letter writer who was disappointed with the cover disc also asked why the magazine seemed a bit short, and got this honest reply:

Whilst, superficially, the first issue may have appeared slim, there was a lot of information packed on every page, don't you think? OK, so it was smaller than the average console mag, but the market must be tested before we throw thousands of pounds on a new magazine, particularly a publication dedicated to a new machine. 

Back in the days of CRASH, editor Roger Kean liked to rate magazines by the ratio of editorial to advertising pages. I'm occasionally going to do the same because it's a good indicator of the health of a magazine and the amount of support a format is getting from the wider software industry. With that in mind issue one of 3DO MAGAZINE clocks in at 18 pages of advertising and 50 pages of editorial, including 26 pages of reviews. That's a good start.

Issue two carries no cover date but is labelled inside as February 1995. Issue three has the cover date of Spring 1995. This anomaly is explained in a reply to another letter asking why 3DO MAGAZINE is thinner than a lot of other magazines on the newsagent's shelves:

The size of the magazine is dictated by economics and the newness of the 3DO and the (relatively) small user base makes a larger magazine unrealistic at the moment. However, as the user base increases in size so will the magazine. After all, before Xmas we expected to publish the magazine only every four months and now we're bi-monthly!

It looks as if issue three was originally planned as issue two, which explains the quarterly cover date, until the real issue two was slotted in for February.

The next few issues see a decline in the number of advertisers who want to pay for big double-page spreads, or full page adverts. The amount of advertising holds steady around 10 pages but the proportion of smaller and cheaper half, quarter and eighth page adverts increases. It feels like an omen when issue five can't find anyone to take the important inside front page space, so 3DO MAGAZINE have to run an internal Paragon advert instead. Issues one and four had double-page spreads from EA, issue two was 3DO, and issue three was Computer Exchange. Is this the normal summer slump or the first indication of falling interest in the 3DO format? Inside issue five, a reply to a letter notes that issue four was very late because of problems with the Syndicate demo on the cover disc:

Of course we'd prefer more demos and newer ones, but as you probably know a last minute glitch over Syndicate delayed 3DO/4 by almost a month. We're always trying for the best demos, but programmers rarely have time to do them until a game's finished and there's also lengthy approval process to go through with 3DO.

The cover price increases to £5.99 for issue seven. The next month a disappointed reader wrote in to complain and was told:

The editorial team are no happier with the price increase than you. We're trying to change it, but as you can see there's very little advertising support from third-party publishers. 

One unexpected advert in issue eight came from Nintendo A full page advert to promote the fact that the N64 is not yet on sale. An interesting sales tactic from Nintendo.

Another reader got an explanation as to why 3DO MAGAZINE was bimonthly when another Paragon title, CD32 GAMER, was monthly:

The bimonthly issue is only partly connected to editorial, it also involves the availability of demos - while these are very popular with readers they're also very hard to organise because, unlike CD32, there's no PD material, most games are produced overseas and all 3DO titles must be encrypted by 3DO themselves.

Tucked away at the back of the magazine was a clue that things were about to change. The inside back page pretty promoted the next issue and usually gave the on sale date in the second month of the bimonthly cycle. Issue eight was dated Feb/March 1996 but this time the next issue goes on sale at the end of February. 

Unfortunately, issue nine of 3DO MAGAZINE is not archived online so it's not easy to see if it made the leap to monthly publication. I think the answer is, sort of. Although the issue is not archived there are covers floating around online which do show a cover date of April 1996. A letter reply in issue ten goes into more detail:

We were slated to go monthly for issue 9, only for the 29th February production slot to turn out as unavailable. From this issue, however we are definitely slated for a monthly schedule - although demo CDs always throw in a little uncertainty!

I wonder if the April issue came out some time in March and was on sale for six weeks rather than eight, a slightly shorter period than normal. We can read issue ten, the first of the proper monthly issues, and the first thing of note is the size and price. The magazine still costs £5.99 but the page count has shrunk from 68 to 36 pages; and the cover disc content is recycled from issue two. Issue eleven hasn't been archived but issue twelve has, and at least one letter writer was not happy with the changes (editorial replies are in bold): 

I recently wrote a letter to you praising your magazine, which I have been an avid reader of since issue one, and which has been of an extremely high standard until now. The rather insubstantial issue 1 0 is, however, an extremely disappointing effort on your part.
1) I would have thought that the justification for going monthly would have been that there was sufficient material to support a full size magazine each month, but you have already reduced the size of your magazine from 68 pages (in issue 1 -9] to 36 pages in issue 1 0 to allow you to publish on a monthly basis. In addition, four game reviews in one issue would not seem to justify monthly publishing.
The primary 'justification' to readers for us going monthly was that was what they wanted. We received constant complaints from people that two months was too long to wait for information on their games system, the latest news, reviews etc, which is quite obvious. The main reason we didn't go monthly was that arranging demo's would be a huge problem - and as it turns out its worse than we expected.
The reason we had to go monthly was economics. A bimonthly magazine has, obviously, twice the per issue overhead costs (staffing, rent, computers etc.) as a monthly one. When the 3DO market began to decline, Paragon could no longer justify supporting these costs. Initially, we expected to maintain the magazine's size when it went monthly, and even added an expensive jewel-box case to increase the quality feel issue 8 was intended to be the first monthly issue. Unfortunately, after Xmas many companies switched their focus to PlayStation, GoldStar pulled out of the console market, Panasonic and Studio 3DO cut back their European offices... and overall advertising revenue practically vanished.
2) I also note that the cover price remains at £5.99; so you are therefore charging £1 2 for what was previously available at £6 by putting two issues what was previously in one bimonthly issue. Doubling the cost for the same output? Is inflation that rampant? Or do the words 'rip-off' spring to mind.
The main economic benefit of doubling the frequency of the magazine is the halving of per issue overheads. The actual size of the magazine is determined by the amount of advertising we attract per issue. It's doubtful we could afford to do 3DO Magazine bimonthly now. If we did, it would be 36 pages every two months rather than, as now, 36 pages per month.
3) Next point: the cover disc okay, so your first choice wasn't available - but how about something new, as opposed to what was previously supplied with issue 2. Or in extreme circumstances, no cover disc and a drop in price?
SnowJob was axed because of the costs of BBFC certification. US Gold simply refused to authorise a Johnny Bazookatone demo. 3DO Decathlon was massively delayed. Interplay refused permission for their demos. And so on. This issue we were confident of US Gold's Olympic Games, before that too got delayed. We are trying... Also, there are a lot of new 3DO owners attracted by the lower price who have asked to see the old demos.

That's it unfortunately. Issues thirteen and fourteen are not archived. The cover of issue fourteen, September 1996, is online.  There appears to be no cover disc, and the price has dropped to £3.99. And issue fifteen? It's Schrödinger's magazine. Some websites suggest it existed  and some don't. Leave a comment, if you know for sure.

Do you know more, or indeed anything, about the UK presence of 3DO? Please leave a comment or send an emails to whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Follow me on Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social

[1] The proper name was the Panasonic REAL 3DO Interactive Multiplayer (I know, what a mouthful).  This was the most common model and was on sale in the UK. Sanyo and Goldstar also produced models, but I don't know if they were ever seen over here.
[2] That's £851 in January 2026. 
[3] It wasn't quite the first because the Amiga CD-32 snuck out in September 1993, followed by the Atari Jaguar in November.
[4] A rare example of an inverse Betteridge's law of headlines.
[5] If you think "several" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, you're right. TEKNO was a supplement published with C&VG that probably covered the 3DO and Jaguar (and maybe... the CD32). I haven't been able to find a copy so I have 0 information about it. If those consoles had been successful then the intent was probably to spin TEKNO off as a magazine in its own right but things didn't work out.
[6]  Alright, the company was really called Matsushita and they traded electronics under the names Panasonics and Technics but in 2008 Matsushita  renamed itself Panasonic and I'm trying to keep things simple.