Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, and how the tech are you. I'm still on vacation myself, so it's time for a rerun. This episode originally published on October. It is titled The Tragedy of Three d Oh. Yeah. This was a fun one to cover because I do enjoy video games quite a bit, and three d Oh was one of those systems I was always curious about and never well, frankly, I never had the cash on me at the time to be able to buy something like that. But yeah, let's sit back and listen. Back in three a new video game console created by the founder of Electronic Arts launched and US Three years later, that console would be discontinued and essentially taken off the market. It was a massive failure. The company that made the console would stick around a little longer, ultimately closing up shop in two thousand three. This is the story of the three d O Company and the console that wasn't meant to be. Now, for this episode, we're going to focus a lot early on at some prehistoric, at least in terms of three d OH information, because I think it's helpful to get an understanding of the man who championed the idea of the three D O, to kind of see where he was coming from, what his thought process was. If I just focused on the console or even the company all by itself, it would be kind of unusual, strange. You wouldn't understand why anyone would make these decisions. So it's helpful to have the background. Also, I just think it's kind of an interesting story with lots of ups and downs. And that story begins with William M. Hawkins the third a k a. Trip Hawkins. He was born in nineteen fifty four. He grew up in California, and his mother, Dr. Helen Hawkins, was a producer and host at a California public broadcast station. She was also a prominent feminist and a publications director, very much a influential woman. And his father, William Hawkins Jr. Had earned a degree in physics before becoming a sales and marketing executive for various companies in California, primarily those in the tech sector. In the late fifties and then into the sixties. Trips father would take a job with a company called Spectral Dynamics Corporation, which employed another person who will be an important figure early on for the young Trip, that being a man named Lane Hawk. But we'll get back to him. So, as a kid, Trip loved games, not just playing them, but kind of learning how they worked, right, What were the mechanics behind the games, What was the theory behind the games? What led to making a game a fun playing experience? You know, it's not easy to develop an actual game that is rewarding, that balances everything out, and he was really interested in that model. And when in high school, he would attempt to make his own version of various types of games. Like he would take inspiration from games that existed that he enjoyed and try to make his own. He was particularly interested in games that simulated sports. He himself loved sports, and so these games kind of gave him an outlet to kind of imagine himself being part of, like a top class athletic team. According to later interviews, Hawkins enjoyed board games but saw that many of his friends preferred to spend their spare time watching stuff on television, and during a visit to the home of his father's coworker that the aforementioned Lane Hawk. He saw something that would spark his imagination for a future industry. So Lane was fascinated with games as well, just like young Trip Hawkins. And he was also really into computer systems, which at the time were not a consumer product. This is the early seventies. This was even before there were hobbyist kits to purchase. Lane had spent a lot of money, like more than five grand, which in the nineteen seventies wasn't even more princely some than we would think of today, And five thousand dollars is a lot of money, but he spent that to buy what today would be an incredibly primitive mini computer. But at the time it was well, it was kind of showing its age at the time, but it was at one point state of the art. It was called the PDP eight. Now, when this computer first debuted in the nineteen sixties, when it really was you know, cutting edge type of technology, it costs a whopping eighteen thousand, five hundred dollars, but this was well beyond the heyday of the PDP eight. And it was also a really big computer. It was like the size of like a cabinet like a wardrobe or a small refrigerator. It was a twelve bit machine, meaning it could handle a range of integers from zero to four thousand ninety five, or you could do from negative two thousand forty eight to two thousand forty seven. Zero would be taking up that pesky spot in the middle. And programming for the machine was, from what I understand anyway, not intuitive. It was not an easy thing to program for. But Lane wanted something that he could kind of work on in his spare time to putter around with. It was almost like a project car for someone who's a gear head. For Lane, it was a PDP eight and he hooked up this computer to a teletype printer. There was no display. There was no monitor for the PDP eight, so you couldn't, you know, look at a screen and see what you were working on. And instead you used a teletype printer and the printer would print out the information that you were working on with the computer. You would read it, you would make changes, it would print on a new page. It's a pretty painstaking process. Well, Lane created a game he called MoU m oo, as in what cows say. At least in the United States, and the game was pretty simple. The game would generate a four digit number and it would keep that number secret. So the game has a four digit number, and it was your job as the player to figure out what that four digit number was, and you would submit your own guests. You would put in a four digit number, and the computer would tell you how many digits, if any, you got right, and whether or not any of those digits were in the right place. So let's say that the secret number the computer comes up with is eight to nine five, and my guess is one five nine three. The system would tell me I got one correct digit in the right location because I got the nine correct and it's in the right spot. And I got a second digit correct, but it's not in the right spot. My five is in the wrong position of that four digit number. So it's similar to a board game that would come out a little later called Mastermind. That one uses colors, not numbers, but it's a similar idea. Now, move did this using moves and cows. A cow would indicate that you had the right digit, but it was in the wrong place. A move would indicate that you had a right digit, but and it was in the right place, but you wouldn't be told which one was which right. You wouldn't be told which of the digits was the correct one. You would just know, Oh, I've got, you know, two moves and a cow, and then my fourth digit is wrong. So I've got to start changing this out and narrowing down what that four digit number could possibly be. And I assume you had to do it in a certain number of turns, But none of my research found anything about that. But for our story, the important part is when Trip Hawkins saw Lanes set up, something must have switched on in Trip's brain. He saw the potential for computers to bring together the world's of television and board games. He imagined a world where one day people could play games on computers with displays, and that's what he wanted to do. He wanted to make games for computers. There was no real way to do that at that time. There was no way for the average consumer to even get hold of a computer at that stage, but Hawkins was certain this is where things were going to go, and Lane Hawk would go on to develop some early arcade games, but that's a story for another time. According to Trip Hawkins himself, around nineteen seventy five, he laid out a long term plan that would lead towards the founding of a computer game company by the year nineteen eighty two, but he had a lot of challenges to overcome to actually make that happen. Now, he applied and was accepted at Harvard, and he was a student there in the early nineteen seventies, and he wanted to work in an industry that just didn't exist yet, and that also meant he faced a lot of challenges when it came to his studies. It's not like there were degrees and what he wanted to do, because the thing he wanted to do wasn't a thing yet. So he started to kind of put together his studies in a piecemeal fashion, you know, taking classes and computer science and programming and related topics. And at the end of his stay at Harvard, he hadn't just earned a degree, he had essentially invented a degree in applied game theory and design. Hawkins then went on to pursue postgraduate work at Stanford, where he earned an NBA in nineteen seventy eight. By this time, technology was slowly starting to build the foundation that Hawkins would need to pursue his dream of creating a video game company. UH. The twenty hundred he debuted the year before he got his m b A, and that took a leading position in the new field of home video game consoles. That same year, nineteen seventy seven, Apple would unveil the Apple to computer, which was the first personal computer from Apple that took aim beyond the relatively small harp hobbyist market. The original Apple computer was a kit uh. You might even see pictures of old Apple one computers in wooden cabinets. That's the original Apple. But the Apple two was the first real consumer personal computer, and it was still too soon for Hawkins to really pursue his plans to make a video game company. In addition, while in college, Hawkins had made, marketed, and sold his own board game after taking a loan from his father. His father loaned him the princely some of five thousand dollars, which again that's a lot of money. And people liked the game that Hawkins made, but there weren't enough people who actually bought it to make it a success. It was a failure, and that failure, I think convinced Hawkins that he really needed to be methodical and patient before launching his business. It would be a bad idea to rush into things. He had already seen what you know, a misstep could do. It could be a very expensive mistake. So Hawkins would conduct the first complete study of the personal computer market in nine that's back when it was a very young field. There were a lot of different computers out there. The Apples, the trs a D or trash a D computer, the you know, the Tan Indie, the Commodore sixty four. Those were coming out around this time, some of them a little later, and he started to get a feel for where things were headed and how he might best be able to take part in a technological revolution. While in school, he attended a computer fair and he actually saw the Apple two debut in person. He was at that computer fair and he decided that he would apply to work for a computer company upon graduating, and he did. He applied to a lot of different places and the one that gave him an offer that he accepted was Apple. The company was happy to bring him on board. He was the first MBA in the company, which he joking Lee said, is always a scary thing. You never want to be the first m B a in a company, but he joined when there were somewhere between twenty five and fifty people working. Their sources don't fully agree on this, which is often the case when I researched stuff in computer history. The Hawk himself has said there were about fifty employees. However, twenty five of them were primarily responsible for physically assembling the computers. So maybe really the sources kind of agree. It's just that some of the sources ignore the assembly line workers and only focus on the you know, the Apple management and officers. That seems a bit elitist to me, but maybe that's what's going on anyway. This was right as the Apple two started to get some traction. As one of the earliest successful personal computers that was available on the market. At Apple, Hawkins would gain a lot of real world experience while taking on an increasing amount of responsibility. He helped guide Apple's efforts to getting computers into workplaces, and he encouraged the development of various productivity applications like spreadsheet programs. Hawkins has said, quote, I didn't invent the spreadsheet, but I did bring the first spreadsheet apps into Apple end quote. This would allow Apple to compete in markets where previously IBM was real the king of the castle. Four years after joining Apple, Trip Hawkins was the director of Strategy and Marketing, which, you know, that's a heck of an achievement to go to a director level position within four years, even if you and you know take into account the fact that the office staff had really only numbered twenty five employees when he joined the company, and Apple had just held its initial public offering and that ended up making Hawkins a pretty healthy amount of cash. But this means that we were just getting up to two And if you remember what I said a little earlier in this episode, that was the year that Hawkins had predicted way back in that he would launch a computer game company, or at least that's what his plan had called for, and other computer game companies were already getting off the ground around this time. At home video game consoles like the Atred had spawned numerous game develop companies. Hawkins made his move to follow through on his plan that his younger self had created, and he left Apple to found his computer game company, now Trip. Hawkins says that at the time he thought video game developers were on the whole not treated so well. They were frequently treated like cheap contract labor on a game by game basis, and Hawkins aim to create a company that would turn that on its head, and that was the birth of Electronic Arts, better known today as e A. And it was back in two When we come back, we'll give a super high level overview of hawkins vision of e A and how that would lead him to found another company, the three D O Company. But first let's take a quick break. Today, the name e A has I guess it's fair to say a little bit of baggage along with it. The company has a reputation for doing some stuff that rubs gamers the wrong way, the big one being that it has a history of scooping up smaller video game developers and then kind of sapping the intellectual property those video game developers had created and just draining it dry and having the developers languish a bit before shutting them down. E A has done this to companies like Origin, which made The Wing Commander and Ultimate Series, Maxis, Pandemic bul Rug Studios. The list is long. In two thousand twelve, e A even made headlines for a really not super awesome reason. It was voted the worst company in the entire United States, but back in two it was a very different company. Hawkins said that he funded e A out of his own pocket for the first six months, and at the very beginning he was the only employee and he was working out of his home until he was able to secure some office space in California, and then he started to hire on employees, and it was only in October, months after he had started. He got started in the spring of nineteen eight two. So the following night two he got together with his twelve employees. This is starting to sound a little biblical, and together they brainstormed up the name of the company, Electronic Arts. And Hawkins had really wanted to stress that games can be a form of art and that video game developers are artists and they should be recognized as such, and Electronic Arts was born. E A's early identity centered around compensating and crediting game developers above and beyond what the competition offered. You know, like most video games at the time, you had no idea who worked on that game. If you found out, it was only because some industry magazine wrote up an article about the person. Chances are you just knew which titles went with which companies if you were even paying that close attention. Hawkins wanted to change that. He wanted to say, no, you will start to recognize the work of specific video game developers, and the ones that make the stuff you like, you'll know to keep getting their stuff. That was the idea, and the company launched early titles like Mule m u l E. It was a combat simulation game, and our Con, which was one of my favorite early computer games. It was a chess like game in which players would control pieces that represented different sort of magical and mythological creatures and characters, and you were trying to take control of a board by controlling the space occupied by your opponent. So you can move a piece into an opponent's square, and that would initiate an arcade style duel where you would try to beat the other player or your computer opponent in a little arcade style game, a little shootout, and different pieces had different abilities. Some of them were super fast but not very powerful, some shot very powerful beams but moved slowly, and so on. Anyway, I'm getting off track, but it was a great game. It's again one of my favorites. Any ar Con fans out there, give it a shout out, because, man, that was one of my favorite early computer games. Hawkins, however, his favorite games were still sports titles. One early e A sports game was Dr J and Larry Bird Go One on One, which, if you're not you know, up on the sports ball, it's a basketball game. Uh you know. Dr J and Larry Bird both famous basketball players, amazing basketball players, and Hawkins himself designed the game, or at least was very heavily involved in the design of the game, and he also brought both of the basketball stars into the design phase and the marketing of the title, and that gave it some prestige in the market to actually, you know, attach real world athletes to this video game title. And if you know your video game history, you also know that this early period of e A coincided with a catastrophic market event around the home video game market began to wobble and by it was in the shambles. And I've done full episodes about the video game crash of eight three, but the short version is that there were a confluence of problems from a flood of bad games by fly by Night developers. There were a series of terrible business decisions at multiple companies. There was the overproduction of titles that meant that the once lucrative industry imploded. Then there are other elements to like licensing popular games or or entertainment franchises that ended up being a cost that you could never recoup that kind of thing. There are a lot of really bad decisions, and entire companies disappeared within a year, and video games in general we're seen as a failure, so much so that retailers didn't want to carry video games or video game consoles. And it was only by kind of pivoting toward computers that companies related to the video game space could stay afloat. And you know, e A had primarily been developing titles for computers, but it wasn't immune to this problem either. The company shifted a little bit in its initial strategy. You know again that was originally to promote games by associating those games with the designers who made them. But now e A was focusing more on promoting specific game titles and making franchises out of them, rather than saying, oh, this is a game by so and so. The company focused exclusively on developing games for various computer platforms like the Apple computers you know, IBM PCs, the Commodore sixty four, and others at that time. Then Nintendo came along and managed to do what most analysts thought was impossible. Nintendo was able to bring consoles back from the dead. The Nintendo Entertainment System here in the United States, also known as the Famicom, became a grand slam home run of a hit. I thought I would use an analogy that Trip Hawkins himself would probably appreciate, But it would take many years for e A to start to develop games for console systems in earnest because Hawkins was one he was wary of consoles after the crash of three and two, he was pretty sure the PC was going to be the future of gaming. When Sega launched the Sega Genesis a k a. The Mega Drive in nineteen eighty nine, at least in North America, launched in different parts of the world at different times. It launched in Japan and earlier, for example. But Trip Hawkins would relent a bit and negotiated a favorable but not perfect deal with Sega for the E E free a tow to publish games on Sega's console and at that point, e A would also develop a few games for the Nintendo Entertainment System and got a little bit out of that niche market of just developing computer games. Now we get to a point where we start to see where the three D O Company idea starts to creep into hawkins mind. Now, to understand why Hawkins would try to get into the console market after he had kind of grown wary of it after the Crash of three, you have to know a bit about the relationship between video game developers and the companies that actually manufacture the hardware that those games run on. The main the console manufacturers. In other words, Sega in particular was kind of a thorn in the industry side, particularly for Trip Hawkins. Sega would insist on steep royalties. Now that meant that game publishers would have to pay a certain amount of money per games sold back to Sega in order to have the games run on Sega machines. So let's say that you, as a consumer, are going out to buy an e A game for the Sega Genesis. Who is getting paid, Well, it turns out a lot of people are getting paid. First, there's the brick and mortar store where you bought your game, because again this is back in the late eighties, there's not really any other opportunity. But those merchants in turn had to spend money to get the stock to sell in the first place. So they would buy their copies of the games that they sell to consumers like you from e A or from a video game distributor. But let's not get too complicated. E A in turn would have to share a portion of each of those sales two retailers. Back with Sega, Sega demanded high royalties, so that meant a smaller percentage of the money would go to e A. E A would develop the games, but some of that money was gonna go to Sega, not to e A. And Hawkins felt that there was a big power imbalance there and he wanted a way to address it. And he thought if he could make a company that designed video game systems and he didn't impose such high royalties on publishers, then creators would have a greater degree of freedom and a large incentive to develop games for that system, and it would usher in a new era of amazing games. This was keyed back into that artist's first mentality, and let's face it a desire to keep more of the revenue for the publisher, not send it off to, you know, the console maker. The three D O model was to impose a flat three dollar royalty rate per games sold, which was much lower than the royalties that were being in posed by Sega or Nintendo at the time. Hawkins had a fairly radical idea. Now, the standard practice for console hardware is for a single company like Nintendo or Sega or Sony to design and manufacture the systems themselves. These companies could have their own in house development studios, but they would also negotiate deals with external video game studios to publish titles on those consoles. And Hawkins wanted to kind of turn that model on its head, and his idea was to create a company that would design the specs and architecture for a video game console, but then that company would license out the design for other manufacturers to actually make to fabricate those consoles. So if you listen to my episode about ARM processors, you'll recognize this model as ARM followed the same pathway. It's something that in Vidio does with graphics cards, although in video also will manufact acture cards in house. In addition to licensing out the designs to other fabricators to focus on three d O, Hawkins stepped down as the CEO of e A, which would come back to haunt him later. He would remain the chairman of the Board of Directors for a while, but he would become the CEO of three d O now and all these initialisms are really wearing me out. Beyond the goal of creating a design for a new console, there were a few other considerations going into the three D O. But it helps if we take a snapshot look of where the video game console industry was in nine that was the year of three d o's founding. So what was going on with video game consoles in ninety one, Well, generally speaking, the consoles of we're in what we would refer to as the fourth generation of video game consoles. The first generation, which started in the nineteen seventies, had largely been consoles with games that were hardwired onto the systems, meaning you couldn't switch out games or anything. The console would have one or more games programmed on it and that was that. That was what you were limited to. The second generation of consoles is the one that had the atar twenty shundred in it. That was part of the second generation. This was the generation that was around during the crash of nineteen eight three. A lot of these consoles had, you know, cartridge based system so you could switch out games and that kind of stuff. The third generation included the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Master System, and a few other consoles. Now keep in mind, these generations aren't like hard and fast with solid boundaries. It's not like, you know, after seven you go from one generation to the next. They're a little more fuzzy. But while Hawkins was working on the design of the three d OH, the leading consoles on the market included the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which came out in, the Sega Genesis, which it act come out in, and the Turbo Graphics sixteen. These were all fourth generation video game consoles. Uh. There were others that were on the market as well, they just weren't as popular. There was the Phillips c D i UH, Sega would include the Sega c D as a type of system, and there were a couple of other systems that were on the horizon in nine one when three d A was coming together. But while the systems like the S and E S, the Genesis, and the Base Turbo Graphics sixteen were all cartridge based games, where the game is you know, hard coded onto the circuit board of a video game cartridge. The future was moving toward optical discs compact discs in the game space. That was clearly where things were going, although some companies cough Nintendo cough would resist that longer than others. Now the standard of the time the fourth generation consoles was for sixteen bit graphics with processors that ranged on the low end with eight bit CPUs. The Turbographics sixteen had an eight bit CPU, and eventually the fourth generation would include a couple of systems that had thirty two bit CPUs with like the sake of thirty two X. Although thirty two bit systems saw limited release in the fourth generation and limited success, they really came in on the tail end of the fourth generation that would play a bigger part in the fifth generation of games. It would take a couple of years to design the three d O and land licensing deals with manufacturers interested in making the new console. The launch of the three d O would put it in direct competition with consoles that belonged to the fifth generation of game systems. More in those in a minute, So the pressure was on. The three d O would need to be better than the existing consoles in the fourth generation or it would quickly be left behind by the next generation of systems from other manufacturers. So the lead designers for the three d O were a couple of is named Dave Needle and R. J. Michael, both of whom had worked on systems or other companies together. In fact, Needle and Michael had both worked with Commodore to design the Amiga computer system. I've done episodes about Amiga, and that story is pretty darn interesting. I really recommend you look into it. It's a fascinating story. So I recommend checking out those episodes. In particular, I think I did a bang up job, if I don't mind saying so, And you can see how that particular project came about and how it gradually faded away. But the two had also designed the Links handheld system for Atari. That's l y n X because Atari was naming their systems after Cats for a while, and now they would be designing the three d O specs for trip Hawkins. Now, according to at least some versions of the story. The design for the three d O really got start in nineteen nine, when Needle and Michael had sketched their ideas on a napkin and trip. Hawkins had known these two for for years, and after learning about what they had in mind, he decided he wanted to join forces with them in an effort to shape this into the three d O idea he was kind of thinking on. So together they formed the three d O Company. The full name for the console would become the three d O Interactive Multiplayer, but a lot of people just call it the three d O. That does make things a little confusing because that was also the name of the company as well, and we'll learn the company managed to stick around a little longer than the console did, so it gets a little, you know, fuzzy when you used just to use three d O as the name. Hawkins looked to partner with different electronics manufacturers to license the design for the actual production of the three d O. Building a hardware company would have been monumentally expensive, so he decided that licensing it just made more sense, and he approached in particular Panasonic, Sony and Sego. Now Sony had recently had a really bad experience with Nintendo. The two companies were supposed to introduce a CD ROM peripheral that was intended for the Super Nintendo system, and Sony was gonna make it, and they had gone really far in the in the whole process, but then Nintendo backed out of the deal. Worse than that, they backed out uh in public at cs and switched to a different company. They chose Phillips instead, and ultimately that didn't really go anywhere. That product just kind of faded away, so it was all for nothing. But Ken Kutaragi, a Sony executive who was in charge of this super disc project, pivoted with the intent to use the super disc technology as the backbone of a new product from Sony, the first PlayStation prototype, which actually was very different from the PlayStation that would officially debut a cup of years later. But not surprisingly, Sony declined Hawkins's offer to license the three D O design for manufacture because they already had their PlayStation in development. Sega, which if you recall, was the company that had kind of inspired Hawkins to pursue the three D O project in the first place, also passed on the opportunity to make the three d O. Apparently, Sega executives felt it would have been too expensive with too small of a profit margin to really get into the three d OH manufacturing game. And this is one of those cases where Sega made the right call. Uh. Those often can seem few and far between if you know a lot about Sega's history, but this was the right decision. Panasonic, however, was a different story. This electronics company was one of the biggest in the world, but they didn't have a video game console. They didn't develop those. There was an entire sector of the electronics market out there that Panasonic was not serving. So the company became the first to license the three d O design and start on fabrication. A little bit later, another Japanese electronics company called Sanio would start making their own three d O consoles. They also licensed it from three d O. Now. Snio started off in n during what was effectively a purge at Panasonic. It was a post World War Two purge of the Japanese company. For that whole story, you should listen to my episodes about the history of Panasonic because I mentioned it there. I just find it interesting that the first two companies that would sign on to to fabricate three D O s also shared d n A in their corporate history. Also, while this doesn't really play into our three D O story, I thought I would just go ahead and mention it. Those two companies would join up in two thousand nine when Panasonic would acquire Sanio, which is just evidence that we live in a really weird world. And there was a third company that would manufacture three D O consoles, and this one was gold Star, a South Korean company. Gold Star is still around today, except it's by a totally different name, and it's a name that you would recognize. Uh. That name is LG Electronics. It changed its name in so the company is still around, but under a different name. While Panasonic, Sanio, and gold Star would produce three D O consoles, there were a few other companies that had agreed to license the design and build their own three d O s, but those consoles just never materialized in the marketplace. Uh. Game Pro magazine was a great resource for this episode when I was looking into this. According to one issue, Samsung was one of the companies that signed on to produce three D O s, although they didn't announce any sort of timeline for production, and ultimately it didn't go anywhere. Another Game Pro issue revealed that the electronics company Toshiba had secured a licensing deal they were going to actually manufacture a handheld or portable three D O system that also never went anywhere. And and yet another issue of Game Pro. But they were really big into covering the development of three D O back in the day. But I found that A T and T apparently showed off a prototype three D O system of their own at the Consumer Electronics Show. But as far as I know, nothing beyond the prototypes that A T and T made ever got produced. I do wonder if there are any of those A T and T three d O s floating around out there anyway. Gold Star, Panasonic, and Sonio would each release a few different versions of the three D O s they produced. Some were never meant to be consumer products. They were rather designed to help game developers who needed, you know, actual hardware to test their games on, essentially d bug kits for their games. Others would swap out basic parts on the systems. A lot of the early three D O s had a motorized c D tray, which is both expensive and it's a point of failure. You know, eventually the motor is going to give out and the tray is not going to extend or go back in, and so some of them in the subsequent models of the three d O replace that with a top loading c D tray, so you just flip open the top and put a c D in that way, as opposed to ejecting a tray. Now, when we come back, i'll run down what the basic spects were for the three d O console, what set it apart from other consoles of that era, and why the console ultimately failed, as well as give a brief rundown on what happened to the company three d O, which again hung on for a few years after the death of the console. We'll get to that after this quick break. So what makes a three d O a three d O. Let's learn about the specs of the console. Now, for the purposes of this breakdown, I'm really just going to focus on the first consumer model of the three d O console to hit the market. That would be the Panasonic three d O Interactive Multiplayer f Z one. This is the system that first debuted in the brains of the machine was a thirty two bit CPU. That was a risk style processor r I s C that is reduced instruction set computer. Now I talked about this with the story of ARM, but basically, it means that the instructions that this style of CPU handles are relatively simple, and that means that each step each instruction is easy to carry out, and therefore it goes pretty fast. More complicated instructions might require lots more steps and that slows things down. The clock speed, or the number of pulses the CPU has per second to carry out instructions, was twelve point five mega hurts. That's twelve million, five hundred thousand pulses per second. That sounds like it's really fast, but by comparison these days we talked about processors that are in the giga hurts range with more than a billion pulses per second, so we've come a long way. Paired with the CPU were a couple of video coprocessors meant to offload some of the heavy lifting when it comes to graphics processing. In a way, it's similar to what graphics cards would do for PCs in the late ninety nineties by handing off tasks like texture mapping to coprocessors, the CPU could focus on other tasks while running games on the three d O. It also had a math coprocessor in addition to those to also kind of spread out the load. Now, this was in the dark times for h D t V was even a thing, though Hawkins has said on occasion that the three d O could have been upgraded to h D t V. I I don't know if that's true based on what I've seen. However, as it was sold, the three d O would generate images that would be shown at a resolution of six pixels by pixels you know, essentially, you know, standard Definition. It was capable of replicating sixteen point seven million colors. The three d O supported Dolby surround sound. It had two megabytes of d RAM, one megabyte of v RAM, and thirty s RAM. But what the heck does that mean? Well, d RAM stands for dynamic RAM, which at the time was the standard RAM of machines. It must be continually refreshed, or rather occasionally refreshed I should say, not continually occasionally refreshed by the microprocessor or else the memory deterior rates. V RAM is video RAM, a type of AM that the computer can actually read and write to simultaneously, and it was particularly useful for handling graphics. And s RAM stands for static RAM, which was a much faster form of RAM than d RAM. But if it's better, why don't just why don't you just use s RAM man? Well, it's because it was also way more expensive, so it would drive up the cost of productions. That's why the three D O also had some expansion ports and had a single control port, but it allowed for daisy chain connections of up to eight peripherals, so you could have multiple controllers plugged into it, but it had the one port that you used to do that with. Uh now when the system went on sale. Oh and it also had a CD ROM drive. I mentioned that earlier, but you know I should throw that in there too. When I went on sale, it did so for six hundred dollars. That is a lot of money. If we adjust for inflation in today's US dollars, it would be equivalent to about one thousand, two hundred sixty bucks or so. So imagine that you go into a store and you see a video game console and its ticket prices one thousand, two hundred sixty dollars This is not a fully fledged computer. It's not like a gaming rig or anything. It is a video game console, akin to something like the PlayStation. By comparison, the Sega Genesis, which was again already on the market it had been since the late eighties that one cost a hundred eighty nine dollars when it launched, and the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which was the reigning champ at the time, had cost one dollars when it launched, So the three d O cost more than both of those combined. It almost cost twice as much as both of those put together. Now, granted, the three d O was a thirty two bit system, whereas the S and E s and the Sega Genesis the regular Saga Genesis were sixteen bet systems, so the three d O could run more sophisticated game games with better graphics. But at that steep price point, would anyone actually buy one? And why was that price so high? Well, it goes back to the three d O business model. See Hawkins idea was to leave the manufacturing to other people, and then to make money through licensing the technology to those manufacturers and later to develop games for the system itself and to collect on royalties for all the consoles and games that were sold for the manufacturers. That meant that the three d O was inherently more expensive than if those companies had actually developed their own hardware in house. Manufacturers, we're going to have to pay three d OH for every console they sold to consumers. So to make up for that cost, that loss and revenue, they increased the price of the consoles, but that ended up pricing the systems well out of the budgets of most video game fans who are out there now. Typically, the way video game console manu factorers make money is through software, not hardware. Most companies will actually sell the hardware the consoles and a loss, so the retail price will actually be below what it costs to make and ship those consoles to consumers. Now why would you do this, Well, it's because consoles are really no good without content to play on those consoles, so the manufacturers would use the consoles to secure customers for stuff like video games and other content. Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo can stand to lose money on console sales if they can make it back by selling enough first party games or making royalties off of games that are licensed to run on those systems. But since these manufacturers like Panasonic didn't own the i P, they couldn't rely on that same model. They weren't going to make royalties off of game sales the way that three d O would. Heck, if if Panasonic had made a game for the console that they were manufacturing, they would have to pay a royalty to three d OH. Now, sure it was a lower royalty than what it would be if you were to make a game for Sega or Nintendo, but since Panasonic was actually fabricating the three d O, that's a big difference, and so the company passed the costs onto the consumer. Understandably, that meant that the sales of the three d O were modest at best, while the royalty fees meant that, you know, developers were interested in making games for the console. The fact that the consoles weren't really selling well was a huge problem. Developing a game is a time consuming and expensive process, and if you see that very few people have bought the console in the first place, well, there's not a lot of incentive for you to make games for it. I mean, if you do spend that time and money, there's a really good chance you won't see a return on that investment. There's literally not enough people with the console out there to buy enough copies of your game for you to make a profit. So the three d O had sort of defeated itself. Now this wasn't because of the hardware, though, to be fair, other systems that could go toe to toe with the three d O were soon on the market afterwards, like the Sony PlayStation, but the failure was more in the business model. Hawkins, for his part, has said that most retailers actually marked the price down to five dollars, not six dollars, because the retailer said, will never be able to sell these things if it's that expensive. So I guess that's something. But even so, at five nine it was far more expensive than the consoles that competitors on the market had. Heck, when the Sony PlayStation would debut in two years after the three d O had first hit the market, Sony priced it at two nine dollars, and like the three d O, the PlayStation had a thirty two bit processor and had narrative amounts of RAM. The f Z one would be the most expensive three d O console to hit the market. That was the first one, but even the less expensive ones were still more expensive than the competition. Gold Stars. Three d O would debut at three dollars. Even the expensive f Z one would drop to four dollars later, but the damage had been done. Adding to the enormous problem of a high price was the fact that developing games for the system was a new process. It was a brand new set of hardware, and that meant that game development was gonna a little more slowly than what the three d O team had hoped, And that meant that some titles that had been intended to be launch titles, like a Jurassic Park game, trailed behind by several months as developers tried to work out bugs in their code. In fact, the only title that was available at launch was a game called Crash and Burn, a futuristic racing game. The console would fare a little bit better in Japan, where there were six whole launch titles to go along with it when it went on sale in n but after an initial interest in three d O, that interest in Japan died down and sales died with it. And one bitter part of the story is that e A, the company that Trip Hawkins had founded back in two ultimately bailed on three d O to develop more software for Sony PlayStation. Hawkins found out his old company would not be developing exclusive titles for the three d O console, but they would be doing it for the Sony PlayStation, and that had to be a knife in the back to see the company he had founded undercut the next company he had found it yikes. The three d O Company was looking at a new console design to try and salvage things. They code named it the M two. This was gonna be the successor to the three d O and it was intended to be backwards compatible with the three d O systems, so that, you know, you wouldn't totally irritate all the three d O fans out there. And the M two was needed because other game consoles were hitting the market that could compete on a technical level pretty effectively with the three d O and they were much cheaper, and that, unfortunately, was just never meant to be. The company stopped development of the M two and sold it off to Panasonic. It's probably a good thing because they avoided the sunken cost fallacy. By the writing was on the wall and the three d O system was discontinued. The Three D O Company switched gears and instead of designing hardware specs and then licensing those out to fabricators, the company would focus solely on developing software for other existing consoles like the Sega Saturn and even the Sony PlayStation, as well as for other computer platforms. The company restructured layoffs followed I mean there's no need for the hardware design teams at that point, and by the company had sold off its hardware business division to Samsung. Hugh Martin, who had been president while Hawkins was serving as CEO and chairman, left the company at that time, leaving Hawkins with the full leadership of the three D O Company. The Three D Company would go on to develop games like the Army Men franchise, the Mind and Magic Series, and High Heat Major League Baseball, which was possibly another nod to hawkins love of sports. But while some of those franchises would do well, ultimately the company was unable to stay in business, and in two thousand three, ten years after they had founded the company, Three D O had to file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. Its assets were sold off, with different franchises going to other game developers, and our story comes to an end. Well. As for trip Hawkins, he ran to some other challenges. In two thousand eleven, the i r S, that is, the Internal Revenue Service in the United States, the agents kind of in charge of overseeing federal taxes. They alleged that Hawkins owed around twenty million dollars in back taxes and that number would steadily go up. A judge said that Hawkins quote continued to spend money extravagantly with knowledge of his liabilities end quote. Essentially, he was saying that Hawkins was using a personal bankruptcy to kind of shield his wealth and was still spending money like crazy on a lavish lifestyle, or, as an old tiny type person might say, he was making hay while the sun was shining. He was doing this with the help of a little accounting company called KPMG. By the way, this sort of financial gymnastics that Hawkins was accused of performing are not that dissimilar from the allegations leveled against a certain United States president. Right now, Hawkins would go on to pay some of those back taxes back, but he would be embroiled in various legal proces eatings regarding the bulk of those taxes. As for Electronic Arts or e A, it is now the second largest video game publisher in the world, right behind Activision Blizzard, another behemoth in video game publishing, and as I mentioned earlier, EA has built up a pretty spotty reputation over the years. Oh and as for Apple, you know, the first employer of Trip Hawkins after he got out of college. Well, Apple is still doing pretty good these days. I hear they actually have a new phone out, so good on them. And that wraps up the tragic tale of the three d O and the three d O Company and the misadventures of Trip Hawkins, which I think would make a great title of a choose your own adventure novel. What's next for Hawkins? I don't know. He founded another company called Digital Chocolate, which well maybe I'll talk about in another episode. Uh, and you know he's still active out there. But yeah, this was one of those stories where like he had some great ideas and he had a real passion for games, something that I think is is really noteworthy. Um, and he made some great moves, but not everybody you know bats a thousand. In fact, very few people do. And this is a reminder of that. I hope you enjoyed that episode of the Tragedy of three d O. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, remember to reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.