Straight from a recent interview with former Sega of America head Tom Kalinske http://revrob.com/sci-tech/264-tom-...rtual-boy-technology-considered-releasing-3do Concerning M2
I'm glad they didn't go through with that, it would have further milked money from Sega and we probably wouldn't have seen the Dreamcast. I am interested to hear more about those "Sega M2 Units".
Yeah I doubt Sega would have been able to hold on for as long as they did and who knows, it might have killed them off completely and we really would have never seen a Shenmue 3 for sure. I like the 3DO though. I used to own one with something like 40-60 games, a chunk of it's library. Such a great system that was very powerful and ahead of it's time. Starfighter was one of the best games I ever played for it. Too bad they didn't push out the M2 systems. Nothing worse than having pretty much finalized hardware with nary a program to run on it. How many tech demos are out there for them? Pretty much no games either right?
Sega considered a lot of designs over the years, there were projects to develop NVidia and Real3d based systems. I'd be surprised if there was a manufacturer that didn't at least talk to them back then. They also turned down the N64.
I mean, the thing that killed Sega as a console maker was too much hardware in the mid-90s, adding a 3DO to that would make the situation even sillier. If I'm not mistaken, the projects to develop with NVidia and Real3D were when they were creating the Dreamcast, right? I mean, they wouldn't have made two at the same time by then.
Quite weird to think about it, why an estabilished console enterprise would decide to simply manufacture an small competitor hardware instead of developing one at the time? Also, is there any reason for them to decide to drop it (Can't acess site)? My guess would be that the consumer price would be too high as it was when released, I wonder why such high price. IMO, the Saturn was the big problem as it was the main product and failed in the west, 32x was another failure but it was mostly an dead end project, even costing half an 32 bit console and having a good sales start, developers weren't interested and died quickly.
I mean, around 1995-97, Sega of America was supporting the Saturn, 32X, Genesis, Game Gear, Sega CD, and the Pico. Europe and Brazil still had a few Master System games kicking around too. That's like at least 3 too many different console ecosystems to simultaneously support. SoJ had an easier time because the Meda Drive and Master System flopped there
Genesis was stil worth being maintained, 32x died shortly, and SCD dised around the same time as 32x, however, 32x and SCD probably didn't cost as much as Saturn to develop, and I think that the 32x was the failure, albeit there was an initial good reaction. But it also happens that old systems weren't expensive to maintain and were somewhat profitable, sony did support 3 consoles (PSP, PS2 and PS3). Saturn however, was a big problem, it was their main product lead and it ended in a failure, 32x, CD were add ons and Pico was an educational consoles, so they only repesented an small part of the problem.