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.

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.

Rockman Neo [Mega Man Legends demo] Analysis Video (With Annotations)

(Originally published at the now-defunct DASH Republic and Tumblr in 2013. Now I'm posting this again, refined, on my own blog because goddamn it I can, that's what.)



At a time when the third dimension was taking over the gaming landscape in the mid-1990s with 3D polygonal-based consoles, 2D-native characters of previous generations were making the leap to 3D, often to mixed results. Franchises like Super Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy made the jump to 3D and closely followed their 2D gameplay concepts. Mega Man's transition wasn't familiar. 

In what could be called one of the boldest transitions to 3D gaming ever, Capcom completely re-imagined the very core of Mega Man for his first major entry in the world of triangular-shaped polygons and textures. No longer did you select your level on a menu. No longer did you jump and shoot across side-scrolling stages and fight eight robot masters and anthropomorphic robot animals, or fighting evil scientists and rogue reploids. It wasn't gonna be the same Mega Man we knew. Not anymore.

Pictures by GodDamnProtoman.

Ah, hell nah. This was Mega Man Legends. You explored inside abandoned ancient dungeons. You shot at creepy bloodthirsty robots that live in said dungeons. You talked to goddamn talking monkeys and legomen. You live in an airship that crash lands on an island that becomes invaded by pirates who gave you psuedo-Team Rocket vibes. You fought a vaguely effeminate, psychopathic cyborg that wants to invoke a skynet-like apocalypse on humans that aren't even humans but "Carbons." You can kick cans over to a bakery and get free money. You could kick animals if you wanted to. In 3D.

So you have these awesome concepts that don't fit into the traditional Mega Man formula and yet it identifies itself as such. How do you market this game to your core fanbase, and the mainstream at large? Well, you create a demo and you include it in the same demo disc of a highly-anticipated sequel to your biggest-selling PlayStation game, with the director's cut release of that game in Japan. Enter Rockman Neo.

Capcom included this demo in the second disc of first edition copies of the Japanese version of Resident Evil: Director's Cut in 1997. The video above demonstrates the several major differences in gameplay, audio and visual content in this pre-release that the annotations in the video will elaborate over.

Mega Man Legends went through many name changes in its development. First, Rockman Neo in Japan, whereas the English name would officially be known as Mega Man Neo when it was showcased at E3 1997 in Atlanta, Georgia; followed by the final Japanese name Rockman DASH. Mega Man Nova (really?) was a likely candidate before someone at Capcom USA or Japan recalled a boring lecture from their astronomy classes in school and figured how lame the name sounded, and finally settled upon... you should know by now.

Yes I know its 35 minutes long (!) but it's full of information, tons of beta facts, and fun stuff that supplements background to this demo. Plus, there's references to TauVertex's Mega Man Legends Abridged series. So take a seat and enjoy all the juicy details this demo has!

If you're even more interested in Rockman Neo, you should check out the Rockman Neo page give at The Cutting Room Floor! Lots of fascinating material found inside the games you thought gave you everything it offered!