Did 'Army Men' ruin 3DO's reputation?

Trev · Post by **Trev** » Fri Oct 19, 2007 8:04 pm

With a console of it's own, 3DO was among the leading game developers, with a number of interesting & polished titles. When PSX won the 32-bit generation, 3DO went mult-platform ... what happened? It seems the company lost its touch once it no longer had its own platform to support (to a far lesser extent Sega did sort of the same thing w/Dreamcast's death) With a few exceptions, most later 3DO made titles were poor, and they drowned the market in a sea of "Army Men' games ... games that fared quite poorly w/most critics. Did sarge ultimately lead to 3DO's demise?

Lemmi · Post by **Lemmi** » Fri Oct 19, 2007 8:56 pm

i dont know really but i ALWAYS hated searching ebay for 3do stuff and that damn game would be like 50% of the links (this was before i learned to filter out army)

and for that fact alone
i dont own one and i never played the game and never will

Post by **3DOKid** » Fri Oct 19, 2007 10:22 pm

I don't know if it actually ruined it but probably didn't help. I guess multi platform developement is pretty hard for a company used to developing for one platform. Even if you are converting games, it still takes resources a company won't necessarily have - and I guess stuff gets diluted.

Plus 3DO got kicked in the nuts. That has got to break moral.

I think if the 3DO M3 had been launched up against the Wii, PS3 and 360 it would have stood a greater fighting chance than against the PSX and Saturn.

IMHO the game industry is headless since the demise of the arcade. The PSX and Saturn sold on the premise super powerful arcade machines would be in the home. 3DO never got any real sponsorship from any arcade vendor.

Today that's less of an issue. Add the fact that the 360/PS3 are essentially the fruits of 3DO multimedia dream, combined with strong support from EA, I reckon it would stand a fighting chance. More than it did when the 3DO was up against Virtua Fighter, Daytona, Ridge Racer and Tekken.

Just imagine... 360/ps3 Virtua Fighter 5 Vs 3DO M3 Space Hulk 6?

Just a thought!

thornton_s · Post by **thornton_s** » Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:43 am

Without a doubt, the term 'flogging a dead horse' springs to mind, although some of them were actually pretty good, there was a version for the Xbox which was alright.

Its the same as Team 17 they are milking the worms franchise to death, i just hope they don't go the same way.

I guess its easier to continually use a well know franchise than to get a new one noticed, shame really as they did plenty of other good games too.

Post by **3DOKid** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 9:34 am

Wasn't Worms born on the Atari Jaguar? When ever I think of Team17 - I tend to think they died on the Amiga. Star dust and Skid Marks? Team 17 really took off just as the Amiga was getting ready to be put out to pasture wasn't it?

thornton_s · Post by **thornton_s** » Tue Oct 23, 2007 9:51 am

I think it was released multi platform so quite a few got the first one. Amazingly they are still alive still mainly working on worms titles(think one came out on the DS recently).