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3DO Files For Bankruptcy 49

Posted by simoniker from the three-times-doh dept.
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to a Reuters report via Yahoo News announcing that game publisher and developer 3DO has filed for bankruptcy. As the article indicates, the former console hardware creator "..has struggled to gain a foothold in the competitive games business and has relied on Chief Executive Trip Hawkins for recent funding." Even a recent attempt to buck their reputation for bad quality games by funding higher-budget titles such as 'Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse' seems to have ended in failure, since industry sources are indicating all except 20 employees have been laid off, effective today, as the company looks to sell its properties.
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3DO Files For Bankruptcy More

3DO Files For Bankruptcy

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  • This article is showing up totally blank (like a template?) on the front page. Something broken? :P
    • Hmm, indeed. Is anyone still seing the blank article on the main page?

      You'll only get it if you're logged in and have 'collapse sections' or similar ticked, so that you can see subpage-only posts listed on the main page, I think?

      • Re:Hmm. (Score:2)

        by Kowh ( 61371 )
        As I speak, it is randomly there and not there on loading the page again. It's as if there were multiple servers and it had not propagated fully.

        I do have games posts collapsed to the main page though.
    • Yeah, I got that too. The title went blue also... #3300cc, not the color used for Games section stories. I'm not a subscriber or anything fancy like that. The article now shows up fine except that the titlebar is still blue. Maybe they just edited Slashcode to have different colored article titles, and messed something up in the process. Screenshot here [mchsi.com].
    • I use 'Light' mode & it's coming up in 'pretty' mode.

  • Who noticed that this was an empty story on the front page?

  • For a minute, I thought I was in a parallel universe where everyone got to be a subscriber for free and "see it early!"

    *sigh* Oh well, here's to wishful thinking.
  • This [penny-arcade.com] sums up everything I remember about 3DO recently. I mean, I do find it rather remarkable that they held on for so long after that console with their name on kind of didn't do so well ... but between then and now, have they done anything interesting? Remarkable? Something that makes this death tragic? This is not a rhetorical question, I really wanna know.

    • Re:Did they ever move anything? And shake it? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by chota ( 577760 ) <chrishota@gmail.com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @12:50AM (#6064973) Homepage
      Actually, you make a very good point.

      I'm reminded of the article a little while ago where the "indy artist" released his album as mp3s on a website and nobody wanted to buy his album (or even download most of the songs)...

      It wasn't because of "the big bad market." It was, quite simply, because they sucked.

      Imagine -- a game company that doesn't make good games... I chalk this one up to good ol' economics. People don't buy games that suck, company that makes games that suck doesn't get money, company goes under.

      Any questions?

      • Re:Did they ever move anything? And shake it? (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        People don't buy games that suck, company that makes games that suck doesn't get money, company goes under.

        errmm... that is mostly true, but i wish to add something. people buy anything that is shoved in front of them if it is marketed right. the majority of not just americans (though we are probably more guilty than most) but the rest of the world too are lemmings and will buy anything if it is priced right and enough people (read: ad agencies) tell that it is good.

        britney spears, gta3, matrix 2, and
      • They should have lobbied like the music industry did to make it illegal for them to become obsolete.
    • High Heat Baseball *was* the baseball game for the PC. 2004's version was a huge disappointment, but before that they had one heck of a baseball series. 2004 was basically written for the console and then ported to the PC. They completely ruined the interface. They did finally get the franchise mode written in, but thanks to the horrific interface, it was useless.

      Trevor
    • No more Army men games from 3D0? I sure hope another developer picks up the rights to "Sarge's Camel Assault"
    • While Might and Magic itself wasn't a really interesting game to me, Heroes of Might and Magic (the turn based strategy game) was always a favourite of mine. Thanks to the also defunct Loki games, I can play it under Linux as well.

      Heroes 3 was the first game I noticed to use MP3 encoding for the background music/sound effects. This made it chug on the low end machines of the time, but it was still awesome.

      They've also touched on a few other things that did well. The problem was that they had nothing to
    • 3DO was the maker of many bad games, but they also made the incredible Heroes of Might & Magic series of games. If you haven't played them, you should pick up II or III - III is even available for Linux - because they were an incredible combination of RPG and turn-based strategy that was, and still is, as addictive as Civilization. Honestly.
  • Nope, they've got a new template!!! It's no longer blank, but if you have all the sections compressed to the main page like I have mine set to, or maybe it the article finds it way normally to the main page from the game section... anyways... I can't tell the difference, but the heading is nicely purple for articles from the game section now! So awesome, no I don't have to look at the editor that posted it to figure out which section it belongs to... or the title, but color coding is much more fun!
  • I find it strange how the last article I read about Trip Hawkins(which was in the newspaper) mentioned his passion for the game business, and I suppose that shows in how he was trying to prop it up with his own cash at the end. But did he really just do that bad a job managing it?

    • Re:A mismatch? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Graelin ( 309958 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @12:56AM (#6065015)
      I find it strange how the last article I read about Trip Hawkins(which was in the newspaper) mentioned his passion for the game business, and I suppose that shows in how he was trying to prop it up with his own cash at the end.

      This is exactly why CEOs make so much money. The good ones truly believe in the company, and in the industry. Some of these people are pure visionaries. Put the right people under them and watch the company explode.

      But did he really just do that bad a job managing it?

      3DO never had the muscle to fight Nintendo, or later Sony in the home console market. They made most of their cash from the arcade scene - which has been falling flat lately. I imagine that would be a fairly difficult market to break out of too.

      I wouldn't blame Trip too much. Lots of companies rode the arcade wave for quite a while, but only the ones who can jump ship fast enough will survive. Sounds like 3DO got pulled down with the ship instead... Funny, I don't remember them being the captian of the arcade market. That'd be Sega IMO.

      • Re:A mismatch? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Babbster ( 107076 ) <aaronbabb@NoSPaM.gmail.com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @01:50AM (#6065305) Homepage
        When did 3DO ever make a lot of money in the arcade market? I'm not even aware that they were ever in the arcade market, unless they licensed some of their lousy console games to someone for the purpose of making machines.

        3DO started as a console company by designing the 3DO game system with the plan of licensing the architecture to other manufacturers (most notably Panasonic) who would build the actual machines. Once that failed (after many attempts and some spectacularly expensive machines), Trip and the gang tried to restyle themselves as kind of "the fresh, new EA" (presumably he felt that he was the reason EA was successful and so he should be able to easily do it again). Instead, they ended up becoming a company of hacks (or at least run by hacks) trying to capitalize on their very few successes by turning out bad sequel after bad sequel (see "Army Men"). They've always been the slowest to catch up with the technology curve (if they ever did) and their game designs did nothing to redeem that deficiency.

        Anyway, no, 3DO had little or nothing to do with arcades. Instead, they're a PC/console game developer that's managed to destroy itself despite the fact that video gaming is more popular than ever...Something even Acclaim hasn't managed. Nice job, Trip.

        • 3DO did have a small foothold in one area in the arcades of the mid-to-late 80's, actually. They supplied they hardware for many laserdisc and similar games. Mad Dog Mcree comes to mind, which is run on 3DO's hardware, I believe. KLOV is blocked at work, so I can't check it, but I'm pretty sure some of those games that were ported to the 3DO ran on the hardware (of course, that had just as much to do with Panasonic as it did with 3DO).

    • Re:A mismatch? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by zonker ( 1158 )
      economics 101, never ever, ever pump your own money back into your dieing company. find the problem with the company and fix it. if you can't fix it yourself, you get someone who can.

      throwing money at a problem doesn't always make it go away. look at aol time warner for an excellent example of that type of mess.
  • Is it just me, or did this story appear blue on the frontpage, while the rest uses standard slashdot aqua or whatever that colour is.

    D.

    • I don't know. I set Mozilla to override a site's colours. ;-)

      I did see a weird thing with this story. It first showed up without a body or subject, so I clicked the "Read More..." link to see what it was, and I got the story. Did someone submit the story blank and correct it?

      It looked something like this:

      Games [slashdot.org]: Posted by on 2003.05.29 4:24
      from the dept.

      ( Read More... [slashdot.org] | games.slashdot.org [slashdot.org] )

      -----------

  • As some of you have noticed, we've had a couple of strange technical problems on this post (specifically, the post initially looking blank, for those logged-in with sections collapsed on the mainpage, and some other weird display issues.)

    Thanks to people for mentioning it so fast, though - we're working on fixing it. Please continue discussing 3DO as if your life depended on it? :P

  • No Sympathy Whatsoever (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Netbrian ( 568185 ) <netbrian@@@aol...com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @02:05AM (#6065375)
    I should try and work up something vaguely resembling sympathy for this company, but quite frankly, I find it impossible. They've had it coming for a long time, with the string of bad Army Men titles, and the implosion of the Might and Magic series, both of which are their own fault. 3DO serves as a perfect study for the case against firing the highly skilled designers and programmers in order to cut costs.

    My heart does go out to those displaced by the meltdown though. I wish the industry was at the point where they could find work at somewhere with better treatment of their employees.
    • Heroes of Might and Magic III is still one of my favorite games ever. I was kinda disapointed, though, with what 3DO did with Heroes IV. There was just something about the game that didn't seem right... oh well, I hope someone else gets a hold of this franchise and does it right.

  • Games agains 3DO! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by s0meguy ( 265470 )
    This site [gamersagainst3do.com] is pretty funny, and pretty accurate too. Shame the message board doesn't work anymore, there were some hilarious posts from former employees.
  • In my opinion the Heroes of Might and Magic series were the only good games they made. It's too bad if HOMM5 would never be made since I really loved the previous games.

    Hopefully some company will purchase the rights to the HOMM-series and release HOMM5.
    • The only problem being that imnsho Heroes of Might and Magic IV is an awful game. To me, and perhaps I am strange (Ah, who am I fooling? I *am* strange) games such as HOMM and Railroad Tycoon suffer greatly when they try to take simple, cartoonish graphics and fairly simple play and then port them over to being "realistic".

      The fun is in the game play, not the trumped-up graphics, so when HOMM4 and RT2 were nice to look at, but not fun to play, they lost my interest in those franchises.

      Also, one of my most
  • Man this is disappointing. The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse game had serious potentional. I'd imagine the game will still get released because it was pretty far along but now I got this feeling they're gonna cut corners to get it out cheaper. :/
    • I hope you're right. This was one of the few games I had to look forward to. Biblical apocalyptic games never do all that great and unfortunately it's one of my favorite settings for games. Let's hope someone grabs it up for release.
  • Ah crap. My uncaffeinated morning eyes read this as "SCO Files for Bankruptcy." I guess that will have to wait a month.

  • FreeDO releases first 3DO emulator (Score:3, Informative)

    by The Moving Shadow ( 603653 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @12:57PM (#6068577)
    It's completely coincidental but just two days ago FreeDO (a 3DO emulator dev team) released the public beta of the first 3DO emulator to see daylight. I haven't tried it because I don't have any original 3DO games anymore nor have i access to bootlegs. I am really interested in the quality of the emulated games because i really think the 3D0 console is one of the most underestimated consoles of the early nineties. Back in those days it was pretty hip, just like the NeoGeo, but it suffered from the same drawbacks. That big black box was darn expensive for kids! Anyway it's really weird when you think that for almost every console there has been built an emu while the 3DO had to wait till 2003 before somebody compiled a working emulator! You can find the emulator and information about it here:

    http://www.freedo.org/
    • My neighbor had one of these... It was *amazing* at the time. I remember seeing full screen decent quality full motion video for the first time, as well as 3d textured graphics for the first time on a console.

      They were just a bit too early... The hardware to do this stuff at the time costed too much.

  • Wasn't 3DO responsible for the HOMM series, which consistently did well? I've enjoyed all the HOMM games that I've played so far, and I'd be gutted if the franchise perished.

    What's going to happen then?
  • I recall Trip Hawkins being quoted liberally in the press around the time of the xbox launch. He unequivocally stated that the xbox would fail, and most likely within a year. The man has true vision. I remember reading it and the only thing I could get from it was that a) He was still bitter about his console flopping b) He was trying to say something controversial to get press c) He was trying to suck up to Sony People may not like the xbox but it's not going anywhere anytime soon. Trip, you can find them
  • 3DO as a company sucked. It Sucks so bad in fact, that it actually causes me to use the word "Suck" to describe it and I hate that word.

    I know some of you are big fans of the "Heros of might and magic" series, but that is the single only product that 3DO carries that isnt a piece of crap.

    3do's strategy has been to flood the market with sequel after sequel of whatever game they manage to sell more than 12 of. There are over 30 Army Men games and they are all garbage. You have the "world destruction le

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