The 3DO Company
The final logo used from 1997 until May 2003
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|
| Public | |
| Industry | Video games |
| Fate | Bankruptcy |
| Founded | September 12, 1991 |
| Defunct | May 2003 |
| Headquarters | Redwood City, California, U.S. |
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Key people
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Trip Hawkins, RJ Mical |
| Subsidiaries | New World Computing |
The 3DO Company (formerly THDO on the NASDAQ stock exchange), also known as 3DO (short for three-dimensional operating system), was an American video game company. It was founded in 1991 by Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins, in a partnership with seven companies including LG, Matsushita (now Panasonic), AT&T Corporation, MCA, Time Warner, and Electronic Arts itself. After 3DO's flagship video game console, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, failed in the marketplace, the company exited the hardware business and became a third-party video game developer. It went bankrupt in 2003 due to poor sales of its games. Its headquarters were in Redwood City, California in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Trip Hawkins wanted to get into the hardware market after the software market exploded with interest thanks to his involvement at Electronic Arts. When the company was first founded, its original objective was to create a next-generation CD-based video game system called the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, which would be manufactured by various partners and licensees; 3DO would collect a royalty on each console sold and on each game manufactured. For game publishers, 3DO's $3 royalty per sold game was very low compared to the royalties Nintendo and Sega collected from game sales on their consoles. The launch of the console in October 1993 was well-promoted, with a great deal of attention in the mass media as part of the "multimedia wave" in the computer world.
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