unreleased IMSA Racing footage for the canceled 3DO/Matsushita M2

[parallaxscroll]

Newly discovered video of a near-final version of IMSA Racing on M2 from 1997

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2ackXME-pE4
don't forget to watch in high quality


Footage from an older, alpha build from 1996:

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=eMa0DHtf0Sw
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_24GhAwlv0
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=LdujBv7ZG48

IMSA Racing for M2 ran at 640x480 resolution at 30 frames per second with no popup/draw in, no fogging, a high level of geometry detail, and high image quality with trilinear filtered textures, and other graphical trickery.

Although extremely unimpressive by todays standards, or even those of last-gen (DC, PS2, GCN, Xbox) this is beyond what could be done on the original PlayStation, or Nintendo 64. It's even somewhat better than what PCs could do with 3D accelerators (3Dfx or PowerVR graphics cards) in 1996-1997. Only high-end arcade games looked better at the time (i.e. Sega's Scud Race on MODEL 3).


Next Generation magazine article on the game







M2 was canceled in 1997. It wasn't vaporware, it was a very real and completed console. Matsushita/Panasonic chickened out, didn't want to compete with Sony, Nintendo and even Sega, because by 1997 Matsushita reasoned that PS1 and N64 were already established, the M2 hardware although powerful, was no longer state-of-the-art, it had aged over the 2 years since it had been announced (spring 1995) and it would face the next generation consoles (Dreamcast and PlayStation2) only a few years after a 1997 release. Matsushita pulled the plug on the console. However M2 was used in a number of Konami arcade games. M2 was also used in various equipment such as highend DVD players, industrial display kiosks, ATM machines, among other things.