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Materials from the encyclopedia
http://wiki.tatet.ru/en/3DO.html state the following:
"3DO Company (NASDAQ: THDO) was founded in 1991 as SMSG, Inc. by Electronics Arts co-founder Trip Hawkins in partnership with seven other companies, including Matsushita, AT&T, MCA, Time Warner, and Electronics Arts. The company's initial goal was to create a next-generation video game system based on compact discs, which would be manufactured by various partners and licensees; 3DO would collect royalties from each console sold and from each game produced. For game publishers, the low royalty rate of $3 per game was a better deal than the higher royalties paid to Nintendo and Sega for developing games for their consoles. The platform's launch in October 1993 was a good debut, attracting significant media attention as part of the "multimedia wave" in the computer world at the time.
Unfortunately, the 3DO console itself was priced at $700, and the promised "early adopters" never showed a large-scale demand for games. The quality of 3DO games was generally considered to be low. When the Sony PlayStation appeared in 1994 with its hardware support for 3D graphics and its outstanding game software, all remaining hopes for the 3DO consoles were dashed. In 1996, 3DO Company sold its console rights to Matsushita and changed its business to develop and publish games for both PlayStation and other consoles, as well as for PC.
After the 3DO consoles disappeared, the company's biggest hit was its Army Men game series, featuring a generation of green plastic toy soldiers that were overhyped by the unrelated Toy Story movie. Its Might and Magic and Heroes of Might and Magic series, created with New World Computing, were also popular and profitable for the company. After struggling for survival for several years, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2003."
The unpleasant conclusion is that a company founded in 1991 deviated from its intended path after just 5 years and went down the path of ruin in 1996...
And yet, I still remember the second half of the 90s, when I got a 3DO console, and what a revelation it was after Dendy and Sega... But then new discs stopped appearing, and old ones disappeared from the shelves... and all this served as a revival for the great Heroes series and the demise of its creators...