On the software side of things, Hawkins announced at the June 1994 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago that 300 developers had signed up to produce games for the 3DO console standard. The future was looking rosy. So what went wrong?

Well, more or less everything. For a start, Hawkins made the drastically unwise decision to market the 3DO as a 'digital interactive multiplayer'; ie. an all-round multimedia machine rather than a games console. In some ways you can understand his thinking. This was of course the time when CD-ROM was a new thing and people were awestruck by its storage capabilities, and by the fact it could handle video footage and CD quality sound. Trip, then, was hoping to attract a much wider market to the console than mere kids - he wanted people to buy a 3DO to view photo CDs, play music, and run edutainment software as well as just games.

The only problem was - as Philips discovered with their disastrous CDi console - no market existed for a multimedia unit. Those who wanted a machine for more intellectually demanding pursuits than mere alien blasting were happy to spend a couple of hundred more for a PC; that way they got a keyboard, tons more memory, a hi-res monitor and Internet capabilities; none of which were provided by Trip's console.

Indeed, despite the best efforts of the 3DO marketing department, people still saw consoles as children’s playthings - thanks mostly to the kiddie-orientated marketing employed by Nintendo and Sega to sell their SNES and Mega Drive machines a few years before. Unfortunately, not only did Hawkins fail to attract mature computer users to the machine, he also put it off limits to game fans with a ludicrous $699 price point. The PlayStation premiered at $299 just 20 months later.

The chances are though, even if he had pushed it as a games machine, things wouldn't have turned out any better. Although hundreds of software companies did pledge their support for the console in the run up to its release, many signed up simply because 3DO boasted a much less restrictive contract and licensing procedure than Sega or Nintendo. The open nature of this agreement meant developers could afford to simply hedge their bets: supporting the machine in theory, but then waiting to see how it fared in the market place before starting work on anything. Afterall, the 3DO company had no heritage in the industry and many pundits were cynical that the machine would ever actually be released.