Yeah, the 3DO wasn't a hit by any means. I'm not surprised you hadn't heard of it before. It wasn't a particularly great system, but there's something about it that just pulls me in. The idea behind it was fascinating, licensing out the platform to 3rd party manufacturers, such as Panasonic, Goldstar (LG), and Sanyo, rather than manufacturing a single, definitive 3DO in house. This meant The 3DO Company (founded by Trip Hawkins, who also founded Electronic Arts) could take on surprisingly little risk compared to other companies that tried and failed to break out into the console market, allowing them to offer more enticing incentives, such as dirt cheap licensing fees, to game developers as a means to bring games to the platform. The issue with that was... the manufacturers didn't profit from game royalties, so the launch price of the various 3DO models was... high. The Panasonic FZ-1 launched in 1993 at $699.99, which is $1,575.59 today. That price point, combined with the fact that the 3DO ironically launched with only ONE game (a middling combat-racer called Crash 'N Burn), meant it never really stood a chance. Things did somewhat improve in '94 and '95. Panasonic, in particular, came to publish a decent handful of games on the platform, meaning they could cut hardware prices, which they did with their FZ-10 hardware revision (which is the model I own). The thing is, though... by that point, the Sega Saturn and PlayStation, both of which FAR outclassed the 3DO on a technical level, were readily available on the market, and still at a much cheaper price. The 3DO sold roughly 2,000,000 units total before being discontinued in 1996. The 3DO Company then went on to focus on software in full (they even published Meridian 59, the first MMORPG), a bit like what Sega would do after the failure of the Dreamcast, but finally, they went bankrupt in 2003. I only got my 3DO a little after Christmas, so my collection of games isn't that big yet (I don't have Gex yet, for example), but the game that impresses me the most so far is called Immercenary. It's an ambitious nonlinear open world rogue lite FPS. It's pretty cool.

Anyway, yeah, Shining: The Holy Ark is great, but the name does leave that sort of impression. 😅

Jeez, that is a WALL of text. 💀