The 3DO Update II [VHS / 1993] | Insight and Mini-Rundown

(Originally published on Tumblr in 2013. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because I can. =P)

A screencap from the opening seconds of 3DO Update

II [VHS / 1993]. Giant lips covered in lipstick is seen on
a monitor behind the console seemingly about to devour
it, frightening many potential consumers in the process.

The year is 1993. The Sega Genesis earned itself the majority share of the gaming market against the Super Nintendo. Cartridges were the rule of the land in video games, and the use of compact discs for games were introduced under the premise of vastly improved sound quality, a larger storage capacity meaning bigger, longer adventures, and especially exhilarating cinematic experiences. The Sega Mega CD and TurboGrafx-CD made it to the market first but, the 3DO would embrace this CD technology in its goal to be the most powerful machine on the market.

Here's a little background since I don't feel like writing that much about it tonight. In the summer of 1993 Panasonic showcased its then-state-of-the-art 3DO video game console to the public at the Consumer Electronic Show in Chicago, Illinois. At the mist of the show, Trip Hawkins, founder and president of Electronic Arts, The 3DO Company, and later Digital Chocolate in 2003, present the finalized specifications and printed circuit board to a formally dressed audience full of press members and industry insiders.

The general public was excited of the console, but probably until they learned of the morbidly-high $699.99 price tag (that's about $1,221 in 2018 dollars, folks) that would bar anyone who didn't want to break the bank from making the investment. Following the event, a marketing VHS was sent out to licensees to cover the well-received press conference and to persuade them of the potential the console had. Along with a complimentary hand-signed letter by company president himself, which can be found below or after the jump, the VHS tape featured four segments (including a complete version at 60FPS that I've recently uploaded! 1/11/2024 Edit: Here's an Internet Archive link to the entire upload with everything and no bullshit watermarks on them. =)):

The first segment, A 3DO Experience is a promotional video that was displayed on multiple monitors at Summer CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in 1993. Lots of strange, obnoxious FMV games, cheesy, early 90's butt-rock and mediocre CGI, and a monotone emotionless narration by two voice narrators that would bore anyone to sleep. At least, the 3DO port of Dragon's Lair looked nice high-res for its time, right...? Nah, I wouldn't know.

The Panasonic Sales Video is the second segment of this VHS that... is just what it sounds like. A relatively unexciting clip created for a "National Sales Meeting" in May 1993 to business retailers and licensees. Trip Hawkins makes not only an appearance in the middle but a bold declaration that "the 3DO is going to be the biggest product in your store since the VCR," for three R.E.A.L reasons. What are those reasons? I'll make it short for you:

1. A 50x technological jump in power
2. Numerous third-party support
3. The 3DO is an Interactive Multiplayer (what a 90's thing to say!)

The third segment presents the presentation Trip Hawkins gave in front of an audience of suits from the press and industry insiders at the Summer CES 1993 Press Conference held on June 3-6 in Chicago. Check out that silicon he's holding on 10:37 as he says "it's real." "Six months ago [at that time], we had the promise and now we have the reality," said Hawkins, unaware of the grim result that would follow the 3DO's performance just a year after it's launch.

This fourth and final segment shows us clips of the numerous news coverage from such big-name TV tabloid programs as Showbiz Today, Entertainment Weekly, Good Morning America, and Headline News (who the reporter's comments, the 3DO name sounds like something out of Star Trek), for the console after Summer CES 1993. At the end of the video, the Marketplace reported that Trip Hawkins had been awarded the CEO of the Year award in the Bay Area software category by the professional firm Ernst & Young. Good for him.

So in the end, the 3DO didn't do too well thanks to its ridiculously high price and over-reliance of full motion video in the games, among many other reasons that I don't particularly care to mention at the moment. If you wish to explore this part of gaming history, I recommend Wiki-ing it or better yet check out 1UP's Going-Out-of-Business article. It really opens your eyes as to how this console came about in the more detailed explanation of how it it came about. Finally for this article, I'd like to leave with a few photo shots of the letter and tape.

The PSone controller had different shoulder buttons; Genso Suikoden prototype footage from 1994!

So I hear Konami has been quite an asshole lately. The way they mistreatment their workforce, withdrawing from console game production, and the complete, sensational mess that has been the Hideo Kojima divorce. Yuck, a cesspool to be sure.

Let's escape from that to about two decades ago when they were at the twilight years of their dignity. Here's a game that I've hear good things over the years on and off, but have never played. This is Gensou Suikoden.

As an RPG game centered around political struggles in a fictional, fantasy empire, Suikoden was made out of a labor of love from the get-go, starting out as a launch title for an unannounced Konami home console. Very little immediate information about that exists on the internet, but the game, under the imaginatively clever name of "RPG," was in development for a brief time but was moved over to the PlayStation, otherwise codenamed the PSX. A relatively more creative acronym than "RPG," I think. In addition, the script for its sequel was originally used for this game but its creator felt he needed more experience to give it the proper treatment it deserved and instead created a "prequel script" for this game instead. 

In July of 1994 𑁋 about a year and a half before the game's domestic release 𑁋 Suikoden was formally unveiled to players at the V-Jump Festival '94 exhibition in Japan. That's not the only feature in the following clip that was preliminary, though.

We also see a preliminary version of the standard PlayStation controller featuring odd symbols on the shoulder buttons that would later become the numbered R and L buttons.

What buttons are those suppose to say, do you think?

It's rather interesting to see this game unveiled to the gaming public about a year and a half before either the game and console came out. It's thanks to this fact however that we can actually see the early designs for the PlayStation controller. As it is known, the original PlayStation controller went through several dozen iterations before the company settled on its finalized design. The most striking detail seen in are the shoulder button designs on the top of the controller. There are no L or R labeled buttons but instead are some triangle-shaped symbols that I can't make out what they're supposed to be.

Obviously, the controller wasn't finalized at this point in time but it makes clear that Sony Computer Entertainment had provided a 3D console that enabled third-party developers like Konami the confidence they needed to jump onto polygons so soon. Sony lured them into their boat quite well.

More VHS crap few would care about (or stuff I find at work in Goodwill)

Wowsers! It's been months since the last update? Let me rev it up here. I've been working at my job at Goodwill for months now and I've been finding some unexpectedly awesome things there since my time there. The following post is not of that level of such but it might be a nice thing for some.

I found a home video tape buried with other crap inside a gaylord that nobody would care about. This one was labeled "DBZ + Adult Swim" in fine-point blue ink on an expectedly worn, generic white label. Out of curiosity, I fired up a recovered VHS player in the item processing area I work in (I'm a "production associate"), popped the tape in, it wasn't what I expected. Lacking the time and luxury to watch all two hours of the tape (time is money and I'm not paid to do that), I decided to chance buying it to watch what I thought would be some Dragon Ball Z goodness. So the next day, I slipped the bastard in a Tomorrow Never Dies VHS box cover, bought it for $0.99 and went home.

I popped the thing into my Panasonic player. It wasn't DBZ or anything Adult Swim related. In fact, apparently what did actually exist on it was three seconds of Inuyasha at the start of the tape and suddenly there's a really boring, over-glorified TV show ─ from fucking G4 of all things ─ about race cars and their douchebag drivers; presumably recording over what was labeled on the tape. Yeah, remember G4? That one channel were Icons aired on and all those bullshit EB Games ads that aired every 15 minutes, and later a bunch of other shows aired that weren't even video game related? Yeah, that channel. They sucked. Just like this tape I blew 99 cents on. What didn't suck though was seeing TV commercials of certain games that I didn't see archived in decent-enough resolution online. 

One was for the 2005 Xbox port of the high-profile, smash-hit Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which by the time this particular commercial aired, the Hot Coffee scandal had just hit public consciousness, inducing lots of congressional shit that era and giving owners of the original release something to giggle about. It's a hot read.

Another was Psychonauts, a fan-favorite game released that same year for every major platform minus the Nintendo GameCube, just like so many multiplatform-bounded games that era. GCN missed out on a lot of good games. Believe it or not, I haven't even touched this game once. Heard about it throughout the years, but I haven't cared to try it. However, the long awaited sequel was recently announced and I know what it's like to have a favorite game series return after a decade-long absence, so here's my unsolicited gift to those fans. I just hope their game doesn't end up in smoke like mine did.

So there you have it, maybe I'll have more articles and YouTube stuff to put up soon. I've got a lot to catch up on so stay tuned.

I've held this sales video of Resident Evil 2 from 1997 for one year, until now.

Because either I kept forgetting or I just stopped caring, but tonight I'll just shut up and provide you with a 30-minute loop sales video for Resident Evil 2, recorded in 60 frames per second and upscaled to 1080p HD.

Dated November 16, 1997 (so it says on the front label), the footage seen here presumably comes from the fan-called "BETA 2" build that was burned around the time this sales video was sent out to retailers. The familiar, iconic Resident Evil 1.5 trailer theme plays throughout the loop, and it contains some differences from the final version (one thing comes in mind is the unused bear taxidermy in Chief Irons' creepy torture dungeon).

As I had mentioned earlier this year on my Capcom 2000 VHS video article, this is the second of three tapes I purchased last year in an eBay auction. The remaining tape I have would be Fighter's Edge.

I'll say nothing else till a question gets asked. Enjoy.

Here's a random proto track and an newly-ripped E3 trailer (@60FPS) from Mega Man X5

Three months!? Gosh, I've been out for a while.

I've been in the mood for prototype/unreleased games again lately. This time, I've taken a listening to a track I've ripped and uploaded on YouTube a year ago, from a prototype version of Mega Man X5 dated May 1, 2000.

The biggest difference to note about this track is in the middle. The first fifty seconds are consistent to the final version, but after that the main verse (or bridge, whatever's the right term for it) becomes different. If you ask me, this version emits the vastness of space much more than the final one (though the stage actually takes place in a planetarium, surprise suprise). Out of all the tracks in the proto, this one is my favorite.

The prototype itself contains a large number of rudimentary elements indicative of its progression into it's final form, all of which you can find them documented at the Cutting Room Floor. The US preview trailer, unveiled at E3 2000 convention in Los Angeles, CA that year, appears to be from this build of the game.

If you want to see the whole VHS rip in it's entirety, you can find it here and reminisce about the old days when Mega Man (and Capcom) was a bigger brand than it is today. 

Let's take a look at the V-Jump build of BIOHAZARD (Resident Evil)

In a time when Street Fighter and Mega Man where the biggest names in Capcom's arsenal of video games in the early 1990s, 3D polygonal games had just begun to be a thing and polygons consisted mostly of origami figures that resembled moving pyramids and stationary chunks of sausage blocks, figuratively speaking. BIO HAZARD, or as commoners call it Resident Evil, would become the company's first bold experiment working with 3D polygons that would pay off in a major way.

Let's set the clock back to late summer of 1995. The PlayStation was already less than a year old in Japan, while BIO HAZARD had been in development for some time already. At this point in time, the game had just moved on from its "co-op" experimentation period (which not much is known about, and if I can even say it was co-op, actually) and into the period where survival was mandatory and isolation horror would shape up the final form it would assume.

On stage, director Shinji Mikami and supervisor Masahiko Kurokawa would present this direction to the silent audience of hundreds at the V-Jump Festival '95 in Japan.

This footage has been around for a long time now and in fact some of you might even recall seeing it on Inflames' website or other familiar locale. For the purpose of preservation (and because I can't stand the quality of the original rip anyways), I've once again taken upon myself to purchase the original VHS source to bring to you remastered footage of the segment in 1080p60.

So the narrative is set in the near-future (for the time of the game's release) of 1998 at the northwest side of the United States where S.T.A.R.S, a police force stationed at Raccoon City, is called in to investigate a series of bizarre murders committed in the outskirts of their city. Upon receiving no word from Bravo team, the team that was initially dispatched the previous evening to find any clues to intercept the supposed killers at the Arklay Mountains, Alpha team arrives swiftly to locate their missing members.

I have an A.A degree in Journalism and I can tell you that that's a
really terrible newspaper headline for a news story.
Not that mine for this blog post is much better.

To their horror, they discover the grisly remains of their compatriots. The vicious dogs responsible for the deaths appear abnormal, and set their eyes and noses on the remaining Alpha members, killing one of them by the neck, and chasing the rest to a nearby abandoned mansion full of zombies and other horrific monstrosities. Now taking desperate refuge inside the establishment are three (six?) remaining S.T.A.R.S members: Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Albert Wesker. They don't know where Barry Burton is or that Rebecca Chambers, who had one hell of an horror fest with an escaped convict the previous night, is somewhere inside. Thanks for leaving them behind, go to hell Brad Vickers.

OK, whatever. Cool story.

*Until REmake came and destroyed every single RE game that
came before it (Electronic Gaming Monthly #80, March 1996).

Upon the unveiling, comparisons were already being made between Resident Evil and the preceding Alone In The Dark, released four years prior. The two share similar horror and gameplay philosophies, but the key difference being that Resident Evil's graphics kicked ass* according to Mikami. He wouldn't be wrong though, it did prove itself as an immersive horror game with an intricate level of graphical detail into the polygon character models and CGI backgrounds even during the advent of the pre-rendered computer graphics craze in video games at the time.

The V-Jump prototype is dated
August 4, 1995.

So onto the prototypical context of the footage itself. First off, only a handful of areas of the first floor mansion are actually playable and the camera positions in some of these areas are drastically different. For example, in one angle, the camera appropriated to the first floor door leading to the first zombie is positioned behind the banister from the second floor (which I find the angle itself interesting, actually). 

Jill Valentine is stands at the front stairs on the first floor of the mansion. She doesn't say much other than "I'll stand watch here." Nothing else. Interestingly, despite her presence in this prototype, Jill isn't actually seen in the embedded footage above. My guess is that in between the aforementioned previous prototype version and the leaked August 4th prototype, her model had just been redone from her previous, implemented design. But that would mean that there had to have been a build of that that existed at some point.

One of the elements I find more interesting is the lack of a finalized set of voice samples for Chris, possibly in Japanese. Presumably, this build was created at a time when the game was still planned to feature Japanese language performances. There's even a set for Jill as well. Take a sample (for more, check out the prototype's page that I sometimes update at The Cutting Room Floor):

Chris:      |     Jill: 

Aside of that, and a snake that shows up from almost out of nowhere at the exit to the garden, there's not much else in the build that provides more of the game than the later protos exhibit. Beyond this prototype, there are at least two more other prototypes (three if you include the Trial Edition) that proceed the progress of the game's development. For now however, the focus is just for this build only. Sometime in the future, I'd like to explore those other builds. If there is a prototype of this game that you'd like for me to explore and document in detail, I'd be happy to.

I'm more motivated to start and complete projects based on the level of demand for their release, and in fact I've invited YouTube users to like this comment I've made about remaking a video about the Japanese dialogue that never materialized in the final game. You can too. Otherwise, hit me up at Google+ or Twitter if you want me to talk about it more.

Late 1995 V-Jump Footage of the cancelled TwinBee Miracle [PS1]

I've never played a TwinBee game before nor do I even know how any of the games play. In fact, I've only actually just watched the footage below after rendering this clip, as it was a recent request and I had only just decided upon rendering and uploading it yesterday. And with that out of the way, here it is:

Unseen64 has an brief article this particular entry of the series that was planned for PlayStation but was unfortunately canceled in early 1996. Not a whole lot is known about it, let alone why it was canceled, but judging from the V-Jump 1995 footage, TwinBee Miracle was to be an quirky 2D RPG by Konami based on its top-scrolling shooter roots with colorful characters to meet and some cartoony worlds to explore. It does look like an RPG I would have played.

Its always too bad to see games that seem to have great potential get canceled. Not to be too off-topic but the greatest gaming tragedy I can think of off the top of my head is Star Fox 2, the sequel to the SNES Super FX megahit of the same name. Thankfully, there are prototypes of that game out in the wild internet for everyone to play and see for themselves the marvel that game is. I'm glad to have made some videos out of it too. Hopefully, we'll see a build of Miracle in the future.

Reminisce Capcom's awesomeness with this old collection of E3 2000 trailers. Complete & 60fps.

Capcom E3 Sales Presentation (Long Version)
No, I don't have the short version.

So I got a seasonal job last month. It ate up most of my time but it was worth it for the moolah. Now I'm back, and I'm starting the new year off with a nice and hella late Christmas gift to my tiny readership.

Last July, I purchased three VHS cassettes from eBay containing promotional videos of various Capcom games from the late 1990s. One of them simply says Fighter's Edge, but the other two held greater interest to me. For this post, I'm only going to post only one of the tapes as it may be of value to a broader range of Capcom fans, especially to those who loved their games in the early-2000s. The other I'll be unveiling on the 29th of this month. The fan-base might just like it. ;) Actually no, that didn't came until Halloween of this year. Yikes, long delay.

The E3 Sales Presentation (Long Version) tape includes several trailers for games that were announced in 2000 including Mega Man Legends 2, Mega Man X5, Onimusha, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, Power Stone 2, etc. Not only does it contain a trailer for RE: Gun Survivor, but a trailer for Resident Evil Zero on the Nintendo 64. Quite the heavy hitters there.

Let's all go mahval for an old E3 2000 trailer of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 (Dreamcast)

Oh boy, this is probably my favorite fighting game of all time.

Having always played the Dreamcast version since I was in middle school, I was actually quite good with my team ─ which always consists of Tron Bonne, Mega Man and Cable, and usually at that order. I've never played on any tournaments, and I wouldn't last long in one if I ever tried. If you've followed me on YouTube, you'll know I did a PEMNAS run of the game about six years ago. At one point, it was the most searched final boss video of the game for a while. *grins*

I actually played an arcade cabinet of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 at a local arcade this past weekend on a trip with family. I actually kind of hate playing fighting games on a fighting stick because not only do I suck with them, I always get cramps on my fingers and knuckles if I play for a while, and that's what I felt after beating the game after one Game Over and two sittings (standings?).

Alright, so where am I going with this? Oh yes, I have a trailer of the game from that Capcom E3 Sales Presentation VHS tape that I've been posting other trailers* from in the past month or so. It's a kick ass trailer. It really gets you excited for the game's chaotic gameplay and because of that I decided to post it on YouTube. And just like the other ripped VHS tape clips I've posting, it rendered at 1080p60 so you can see the action as it's intended to be seen. So here you go.

I will be posting the video in its entirety sometime tomorrow or the following day. Consider it a late Christmas gift or a New Year's Day gift. Get crazy.

GOD DAMN RENDERING CANCELLED PREMATURELY!

Get hyped. Old E3 2000 Trailer for Resident Evil Zero (Nintendo 64) now at 1080p80!

Resident Evil games always had some of the most interesting development stories told in video games. Compared to other entries in the franchise though, Resident Evil Zero had a much less chaotic development cycle.

I've already briefed this a bit in the last post, but this game was about to come out late in the Nintendo 64's life cycle and memory wasn't helping. So Capcom moved the game over to GameCube so it could become the gorgeous, bad-ass looking game that it became.

Now, about the footage. If you were a major Resident Evil fan back in the day, you may have seen this particular trailer from E3 2000 before in the past as a really low-res video on YouTube or even back in the day when, even then, it looked like a pixelated mess of squares. Now, thanks to a VHS source I purchased online where this trailer originated from, and for YouTube for finally enabling 60FPS video playback, I can finally now share this 1080p60 HD rip of the trailer that was originally of low-quality for the rest of the world to watch.

I'll get into the meaning behind Capcom E3 2000 Sales Presentation [VHS / 2000] at a later point of time. There's more where this trailer came from too! Stay tuned!