Who here bought a 3DO in it's first 6 months of existence?
The reason that I put "the first 6 months" instead of launch day, is because I have to assume that there really weren't all that many people that got one on launch day, with it's incredible price tag.
Sure, I'm sure some of you guys did actually buy it on launch day, and I would love to hear your stories about that, but alot of us had to wait until we found a "Open Box" or "Demo Unit" 3DO at a Circuit City or someplace like that.
I can remember that I ended up getting a 3DO right around the time that John Madden Football first came out on the machine. First off, John Madden Football was the first game that made me feel like I really, really needed to have the system, and secondly I found an Open Box unit at a Good Guys store for like 200 hundred or more off the regular price. Also, this place Good Guys had a 60 day policy for returns on Open Box merchandise at the time. So if you weren't happy with your purchase in that 60 day period, you could return it and get your money back. Well, I actually returned mine on the 59th day, and I got a full refund. At the time, I was thinking that I would buy the 3DO again, once the price dropped some more. I actually had some games at home that I kept, anticipating buying the 3DO within the next several months after a price drop. Then like 2 weeks later, I think the price officially dropped to $399.99. So I ran back out and got a brand new unit.
I have to say that I think that the 3DO gets very little respect with regards to the history of videogaming, but I really think that the 3DO was a pretty amazing machine for it's time. After having played nothing but Genesis and Super Nintendo games, the 3DO was a gigantic leap forward in technology. You have to admit that the first time that you played Crash N Burn and Total Elcipse, you had to be thinking, "This is F'ing UNREAL".
It really was a huge, huge leap from the days of 16-bit games. Sure, the powers that be at 3DO had their business model twisted into a pretzel with the idea that they wouldn't use the old give away the razor to sell the blades technique. Also their lineup early on, had a huge number of multimedia type titles, that made it seem like the 3DO was afraid to be considered a "game machine". It took awhile for Trip and Company to actually "get it", and by that time it was too late. The price drops came to late, and weren't dramatic enough, and then the arrival of the Saturn and the Playstation was pretty much the beginning of the end for the original 3DO.
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Originally Posted by T
