All Jaguar and 3DO Games (Kinda) In Order: 1994 Round-Up

The thing about 1994 is that it came directly after 1993. Not a lot of people know this, mainly because it’s been two years since we did our 1993 Round-Up. We think of our modern times as having too much happening in the world all the time, but it was the same back in the 90’s as well. 1994 saw the final diplomatic end to the cold war, the mainstreaming of the internet, horrific violence on a mass scale the world over, the election of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, international trade kerfuffles, political skullduggery, major sporting events, and all the typical day-to-day events in a chaotic world.

Looking at American pop culture, this was the year where Forrest Gump, Lion King, and Speed came out. Cable television was rapidly expanding, Next Generation had its final season, and basic-bitch network sitcoms were still the biggest things going. Well, the OJ chase was the most watched thing on TV but that’s neither here nor there. The biggest music act in the country was TLC, even though they weren’t getting paid, and this was the year which saw the debuts for Nas, Green Day, Oasis, and Weezer. It was also the last year of Nirvana’s existence for the obvious reason. When considering the overall tech space, well, I insist you watch this video in its entirety:

For video games, this was the year where the 3DO and Jaguar saw wide releases, which we will get to later. There were a couple of other regional fifth generation pretenders in the Playdia and PC-FX, but they barely rate mention. SNK also put out a CD based Neo Geo, which is neat. Oh, I suppose these little systems called the Saturn and PlayStation launched in Japan, with the 32X coming out simultaneously in the US because Sega loved poisoning their own well. Yet, none of these new systems were moving big numbers yet, with the SNES and Genesis at the peak of their relevance. Nintendo even came into CES calling ’94 “The Year of The Cartridge” because of course they would, all of their attempts at CD anything had been disasters. Still, even though I would have to dig for the numbers, it’s around ’94 or ’95 that worldwide cartridge game sales would peak until we get to the Switch. The industry was on the brink of a new technological era and everyone knew it. It was also on the brink of other things as well, with those infamous congressional hearings leading to the creation of the ESRB.

*From Computer Gaming World 114. I had to see it now so do you.*

None of the games we’ve looked at for the 3DO or Jag matter now nor when they were released. At the time, 16-bit consoles saw the releases of Donkey Kong Country, Mortal Kombat II, Final Fantasy VI, Sonic 3, and NBA Jam. Arcades were already in the polygonal future with Virtua Fighter II, Daytona USA, and Tekken. PC games were really going through it in the aftermath of the 1-2 punch that was Myst and Doom the previous year. Point-and-Click Adventure games and cRPGs were in downswings, the market was seeing the beginning of the tidal waves of Doom Clones and FMV slop, and Strategy games were on the cusp of blowing up with the releases of Warcraft and XCOM. It was a big year all around, even for our intrepid underdogs The 3DO Company and Atari.

The 3D Oh No

Picking up where we left off with the 3DO at the end of ’93, the console’s first holiday season in the US saw sales somewhere in the neighborhood of either 15,000 or 30,000 units depending on the source. Whatever the real number happens to be, it seems to have met financial expectations, but those sales would have represented low single digit percentage points of overall console sales in the same period. The limited initial game library would be expanded steadily throughout ’94, though with rapidly decreasing press enthusiasm and middling reviews. On top of poor software performance, the licensed manufacturing business model was twisting the 3DO into a pretzel. Manufacturing deals with Goldstar and Sanyo finalized in this year wouldn’t amount to as much as the company would have wanted, and various gimmicks involving a cable modem plug-in and a 3DO computer card never went anywhere. On top of that, as developers, the press, and enthusiasts got better views at what the big players were planning for the next generation, the 3DO quickly turned into the red-headed stepchild of the industry. Ultimately fewer than 200,000 consoles would be sold in North America by the end of the year, showing a pace of adoption that never really picked up after that first holiday season.

But the 3DO wasn’t some small regional player, it was an international system, and the biggest deal of the year was its March 20th launch in Japan. Even though the system was managed by an American company with American business philosophies, it was being manufactured by Panasonic and could kinda sorta also be considered a Japanese console. At least, that’s what Panasonic’s parent conglomerate, named Matsushita at the time, thought about the 3DO. So, the Japanese launch was treated as seriously as these people could manage. Before getting into the weeds, I’ll come out and say that this thing sold better in Japan than anywhere else both at launch and over its lifetime. This makes it an outlier in the history of the console market, since Japanese consumers have never given a single shiny fuck about consoles from non-Japanese companies. I know you’re saying, “it sold well over there because of all the porn hurr hurr,” to which I will violently remind you that the PC-98 existed and there were a variety of ways to get CD-based smut. My explanation for its relative success comes down to a large Japanese conglomerate having skin in the game and putting some fraction of its weight behind the system.

The word in that last paragraph doing the heaviest lifting is “relative.” The 3DO seems to have sold somewhere around 70,000 units in its launch window and would go on to do around 450,000 boxes sold for the year. In comparison, The Saturn and PlayStation would release in November and sell somewhere around 840,000 and 600,000 consoles respectively over like six weeks. It was the most successful of the failed 32-bit consoles, but there’s no prize for being the best of the worst. The culprits for this failure were the same in Japan as in the States. It was by far the most expensive console on the market, launching at a 25-40% higher price than the Saturn or PS1, and the games themselves were absurdly expensive as well, with 3DO discs priced something like 3,000 yen more than PS1 games. And that’s just the next gen stuff; the pricing looks even worse compared to where the 16-bit systems had gotten to by ’94. I’ve also seen a source claim that 3DOs were initially only sold at stores owned by Matsushita, which would have been limiting if true, but I have no way to verify that. Regardless, the system was far from a breakout success.

Now, what games were on offer at the Japanese launch? If you remember, the limited US launch in ’93 only saw the packed-in Crash ‘n Burn released on day one, which wasn’t a good look. By the time we get to March ’94 in Japan, Panasonic had scared up seven whole games to have available on launch day. These include four games that would see US releases, The Life Stage: Virtual House, Pebble Beach Golf Links, Real Pinball, and Stellar 7: Draxon’s Revenge for some reason. The three Japan-only games were an Ultraman licensed fighting game that’s funnier than it is good, a Hanna-Barbara licensed Wacky Races game which is apparently one of the worst racing games ever made, and an FMV detective adventure game that, while looking bad, might be the most compelling experience of the bunch. The month of March would then be rounded off with the additions of Crash ‘n Burn, Dragon’s Lair, Escape From Monster Manor, and Total Eclipse. If we expand the launch window out a bit, April would see the releases of Doctor Hauzer, Iron Angel of the Apocalypse, and whatever the hell this thing is. On their own, that is not an encouraging set of games, but it’s a sight better than what the US launch had to work with. For the record, it took like three or four months for the first porno disc to come out for the 3DO in Japan.

So, by the end of ’94 the 3DO was an internationally distributed console with hundreds of thousands of sales, a growing library of multimedia discs, a small variety of manufacturing deals, abysmal word of mouth, and its imminent doom on the horizon. I’ll get more into the staggering hardware variety they would cook up across ’94 and ’95 in the next round-up since that’s more of a multi-year story. Just know that late ’94 can be seen as the peak of this system’s success and relevance.

The Atari Housecat

Researching the Jaguar is always a bummer. In the last round-up I dove a bit too deep into why it came into existence, which means this is the part where I have to talk about the slow, painful death of this iteration of Atari. Though, again, I suppose it fulfilled Jack Tremial’s purpose of causing consternation for Commodore. Not that it was responsible for the Amiga’s demise, since the advent of Windows killed off bespoke regional computer systems the world over. So really, Commodore would have died even without the Atari ST, but there was no way to know that in the 80’s. Anyway, with its reason for existence fulfilled, Jack fully handed Atari off to his son, Sam, by the end of the 80’s, who really tried to make the company back into what it originally was. It was a quixotic effort, though, since the company was far too undercapitalized to make a serious go at game hardware. They probably could have pivoted to small-dollar game publishing, but then Acclaim might have sent some guys to take out Sam’s kneecaps, so who knows.

What we do know is that Atari put out the Lynx handheld in 1989 as the original high-end Game Boy competitor, which didn’t financially move the needle for them much one way or the other. They then cobbled together a heavily compromised next gen system named after a different big cat with the most cursed controller of all time and got enough on shelves for a test market launch in late ’93, moving about 17,000 units. In ’94 the Jag saw a wider US launch and a few thousand boxes shipped to Europe, totaling out to about 100,000 units. For a company with only like one-hundred-something employees that isn’t bad, but even the 3DO was able to crap out over 600,000 consoles in the same time frame while pricing it at something like 3x the MSRP of the Jaguar. There are several reasons for this, beyond the obvious lack of good games.

First, Atari was so massively underwater in the early 90’s it’s not even funny. You can find their annual fiscal reports online, and they paint a harrowing picture. The last good year for the company as a multi-product regional computing player was 1990. They were seeing $400M a year in sales, gained some amount of profit, had over 500 employees not counting contractors, and were doing reasonably well as the Atari ST people. Then in ’91 their sales halved, presumably because the computing business had gotten away from them as it was doing for many other mid-sized players. In ’92 sales halved again, but this time so did their headcount and total assets. Even then the company went deep into the red financially. By the time ’93 and the Jaguar launch came around Atari was running with a little over 100 people and something like 7% of their 1990 revenue. The company was just the video game division by that point and even then, they were barely afloat. In fact, Atari would have run out of cash entirely in 1994 if they hadn’t received $32M from shaking down Nintendo and Sega in patent lawsuits. Yet, as bad as that is, Commodore didn’t slim down nearly as much and would be fully bankrupt in April 1994, so I guess we can check the scoreboard on that.

The technical term for this is 'a bad time' — *The technical term for this is ‘a bad time’*

I can’t even imagine trying to R&D, manufacture, and distribute a new next gen console while spinning up a whole publishing apparatus at a company that is in multi-year freefall and selling off most of its assets to stay afloat. Hell, Atari’s total R&D budget in the lead-up to the Jaguar launch, when adjusted for inflation, is roughly the same as the amount of money raised for the Intellivision Amico. I want you to sit on that for a minute. With an Amico level of resources and a handful of engineers, go design a next gen console to a complete prototype stage and then get the thing manufactured while finding literally anyone to develop games for it. I’m amazed the Jag existed at all.

This foundational money problem explains why they had a hard time getting people to make games for the Jaguar. The lack of budget and people for developer relations is why most of their developers were small teams of random British guys, and Id because Carmack felt like it. That lack of support is also why most Jaguar games overran their development schedules. Studios need a lot of engineering support when developing for new consoles, which is money and headcount. The Jaguar CD drive took two extra years to reach the market because they were working with an Amico-tier engineering budget and also flirting with boondoggles like a VR headset and PC cards. The console was too expensive for what it was because they couldn’t take a loss on hardware like Sony was about to do. The money problem can even explain why their marketing was both scarce and cringe, as you can see below.

Atari needed to move a lot of hardware and software to stop the bleeding. Instead, by the end of ’94 they had shipped 100,000 consoles and published 17 games in 15 months. It didn’t help that 13 of those games had no redeeming value, even by contemporary standards. They needed to launch with their best foot forward, but they couldn’t afford to. They needed competent marketing, but again. The Jaguar’s reputation was already unsalvageable by the time Atari went to CES ’95 with their bevy of pie-in-the-sky promises. Most of the games in development for the system would either get cancelled or be thrown out the door in 1995. It was a joke for consumers, and the few developers working with Atari were about to stop returning their phone calls. I don’t know of any tell-all books about this era of Atari, but I would love to read one, the vibes must have been catastrophic.

CD Quality Stats

Now that we have all that context out of the way, let’s get to the important part: the glorious return of the BORQ! The 13 Jaguar games from this year aren’t enough to dig into, but there’s more than enough meat on the 3DO’s bones, even if that meat is mostly rotten. Let’s get a quick run-down of the Jag out of the way before we BORQ it everywhere.

We’re going to break down the Jaguar’s development geography by country instead of region, because that’s where we are with this thing.

The 13 released Jag games were developed in:

America: 3
Britain: 8
France: 1
Germany: 1

That should give you sense of the Tremials scraping the bottom of their old Commodore network of contacts. I wasn’t exaggerating that much when I said the Jag’s game development was done by a couple dozen British guys. For the record those three American games consist of the two Id ports and Club Drive. Now let’s see where these things originated from:

Original: 8
Amiga: 2
PC: 2
Multiplatform: 1

Those two PC titles are, again, the Id games and the multiplat is Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. I’m not sorry for reminding you that game exists. There isn’t much we can learn from this. I mean, the Jaguar’s holiday lineup was anchored by frickin’ Bubsy. This is not a place of honor, no great deeds were done here. Speaking of which, the 3DO.

We probably need to do a reminder of how the Borgmaster Ordinal Ranking Qualifier (Borgmaster is my Giant Bomb username) works. As I play games for these various systems, I rank them. If the system has enough games, this ranked list can be divided into equal or near-equal quintiles. That’s quint- meaning five, not quart- meaning four. These five roughly equal segments are given a score going from 5 with the top segment to 1 with the bottom segment, which assigns the games in those segments their individual BORQ scores. Because this is a math-based score distribution, we can run some stats on them. The metrics I’ve bothered to stick with over the years are looking at these scores by development region, game source, month, and blog entry. Since we don’t have good release dates for most of these games, we’re not going to mess with any month analysis when looking at the 3DO. Nor are we going to look at the sports games, because there’s like three of them (Madden, FIFA, and Jammit) for the entire year. So, let’s start with development region.

Even though there was plenty of Japanese development for the 3DO, there wasn’t a ton of cross-pollination between regions, with only “first party” 3DO games going to Japan and games from either big players like Capcom or weird freaks like System Sacom and Genki coming over to the US. This leads us to a similar pattern that we saw with the first year the PS1 and Saturn, where the Japanese games were, on average, significantly better than everything else. In this case, I’m personally bummed to see North American development languish at the same level as the European stuff but remember those 39 games contain a bunch of American Laser Games releases and Plumber Don’t Wear Ties. For my own gratification, I ran the BORQ for North America again without the five ALG games (Space Pirates, Mad Dog McCree 1 and 2, Drug Wars, and Who Shot Johnny Rock) and the resulting collection of 34 games have a BORQ of 3.02. American Laser Games did .23 BORQ worth of damage to US game development. I’ve never used this as a damage value before, which just shows how things are going for the 3DO.

In a change from what we saw in the first year of the PS1 and Saturn, the original releases and PC ports fared the best, though most of these categories don’t stray far from baseline. Still, this pattern is skewed by outliers. If you remove the four ALG games from the Arcade releases, the three remaining games (Starblade, SSFIIT, and Strahl) would have averaged a perfect 5.00, and if you removed the three inexplicabley good PC ports (Star Control II, Super Wing Commander, and Sherlock Holmes) the PC score falls to 2.54. That would bring the overall pattern more in line with the other systems, but weird outliers are what the 3DO existed for. Also, you’ll note the total BORQ for the year being 2.98. The average goes up to 3.00 when adding in the ’93 releases, so that score can be interpreted as a score for the year as a whole. Though, it’s close enough to baseline that it isn’t particularly meaningful. We’ll check in at the end of ’95 and see how these yearly scores change. Finally, allow me to indulge in a bit of personal analysis.

This handy chart tracks the rollercoaster of pain that was covering the 1994 releases for the 3DO. Of course, a lot of the entries were skewed by the presence of N/A’s, either non-functional games, literal non-games, or pornography. You can see that the best and worst entries were both visited by the N/A fairy. In all, we excluded DinoPark Tycoon (busted), Mind Teazzer (porn), NeuroDancer: Journey into the Neuronet! (porn), PaTaank (busted), Shadow: War of Succession (holy shit is this busted), and Space Shuttle (non-game) in that order. The only real loss was Pataank, which looked like it might have been a top 20 game had it worked. Oh well, the 3DO train stops for no one.

1994 GOTY

Regardless of your highly subjective and incorrect assumptions about the Jaguar and 3DO game libraries, each system by definition had to have a GOTY. I have shouldered the burden of precisely determining the 1994 Games of the Year for both of these systems. Let’s start with the Jaguar, and refence my working sheet below.

Starting with the complete list, because why not, we first remove the 1993 releases. We then cut out the games not worth consideration, such as the true bottom-feeders and Club Drive. That leaves us with a top 8 list and the top four being the only games yet seen on the system with any redeeming value whatsoever. Yet, that’s my own predilection; to provide a less-subjective list we have to go game by game and ask the following questions:

Is this game a complete thought?
Is the creative idea behind that thought any good?
Is that thought properly executed?
Is the end product novel in any way?

Reordering the list according to those answers and their magnitude leads to our final result. Doom is the 1994 Jaguar GOTY, largely due to it being fucking Doom and playable as such for the first time on a console. The main downside is that It fails the fourth question pretty thoroughly by being a port, though the second-place game is a remake of a 80’s arcade game and the third game is also a port, so that isn’t really a factor when everything is said and done. The most notable positional change is Alien vs Predator dropping down from 4th to 6th, which, despite being novel and a good idea, is executed terribly enough to outweigh those positives. I mean, only like a third of that thing is playable and even then, it’s too janky to be more than a curiosity. I like weird curiosities, but that’s a me thing.

Moving on to something with a bit more rotten meat, the 3DO technically has to have a GOTY. Let’s see how that went.

First, I can’t fit 59 games into a single screengrab, so we’re starting with the top 50 games from my rankings. This will probably be a useful compromise for later years. From there we can filter out irrelevant nonsense like the edutainment, busted crap, non-critical ports, and borderline non-games, keeping Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties at this stage just for the shock value. Of these 31 remaining games, we lop off the actual-for-real garbage and are left with a top 14 list. I liked Guardian War and Seal of the Pharoah above anything else, because of course. Finally, we need to use our criteria to reorder this into something resembling a normal top 10, which leads us to that final list.

We’ve gotten ourselves into the same situation as with the Jaguar. Even though it’s a port, Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is the best 3DO game of 1994 because no fucking shit. The second game should be equally obvious, but Madden at 3 is probably a surprise. It’s a complete game for the time, competently executed, and the first time you get a CD-based Football game, which is novel enough. I’m not gonna call it fun, but as far as real games on the 3DO are concerned, it fits the criteria third best. That’s also how FIFA ends up at number 5, though it’s less good of a game than Madden. I’m able to justify my fave up to 4th, and Starblade gets to 6th also off of answering the questions in a generally positive direction. It helps that it’s a good game with a fascinating history.

It’s difficult to remember Gridders, but it really is a novel idea executed competently enough for a 3DO release. At 8th we have Road Rash, which while being a complete thing and playable, is still a step back mechanically from the contemporary Genesis games in that series. I really feel bad about putting Seal of the Pharoah at number 9, but no matter how much I vibe with that game I can’t escape the fact that it isn’t particularly good. It’s a First-Person Dungeon Crawler that is mechanically sparse and has almost nothing of note going on by the contemporary standards of the genre. Really, its only quality is the bizarreness with which it presents itself, which is something I highly value but isn’t enough to prop up the experience for most people. Finally, there’s Total Eclipse, which is just a bad game.

Congratulations to Doom and Super Street Fighter II Turbo for being two of the best videos games of the early 90’s.

Let’s Talk Packaging Design

Alright, look, the thing with video games back in the day is that there was no consistency in packaging. When looking at the 1980’s, NES and Genesis game boxes were close enough in dimensions to each other to be fine, while also only being like an inch wider than VHS sleeves. It was largely fine, and everything was cardboard so who gives a shit. The upshot is that there was a roughly consistent aspect ratio for box art, so you can compare them pretty easily. The SNES slightly reduced the height and width of the box while slightly thickening it. Nintendo would keep that measurement for the N64, thus brute forcing a standard for cartridge packaging, which is why the Jaguar uses boxes as close to that size as possible without getting in legal trouble.

With the growing popularity of CDs, a standard case size was quickly established for all CD uses. These are the roughly 5.5 x 5 inch jewel cases we all know and accidentally crack. In Japan, the 3DO, Saturn, and PS1 used this standard from the beginning. Yet, in North America, for reasons I haven’t found, no one thought American consumers would buy games in that kind of package. The PS1 and Saturn longboxes were bad enough, offering dubious proportions for box art that was inconsistent with all other CD packaging, but then you get the 3DO. For some reason, they started with the Genesis box dimensions and added 3 whole inches to the height. These games had boxes like 40% taller than VHS sleeves and like a third wider. That’s absurd and leads to a box that was harder to make art for than anything else on the market. That’s why it all looks fucked up. The 3DO had the worst possible longbox, which is why the best box art was not from North America. With all that said, here’s some notable box arts from the Jaguar and 3DO.

Starting with the Jag, the two Id games clearly have the best box art, but that’s cheating. Disqualifying those, here’s the best and the worst.

Jaguar BAOTY

Worst Jaguar Box Art

Video Game Mascot Who just Slipped Something Into Your Drink

Now for the 3DO junk. We’ll only look at North American box art this time, but we’ll take a look to see if anything better was happening in other territories when we get to the end of the road for this console.

3DO BAOTY

Runners Up

The Other Box Art Where A Guy Stares At You All Mean

Surprisingly Clean Design

Probably Shouldn’t Have Used This

Most Evocative Box Art

What The Hell Is Even Going On Here

Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties Jumpscare

Unused Screenshot Hall of Shame

*Only two things in life are certain, FMV and taxes*

*Looks directly at you through the screen*

*By far the worst episode of Epic Rap Battles of History*

At least she's having fun — *At least she’s having fun*

The is what the chemicals they're putting in the water turn you into — *The is what the chemicals they’re putting in the water turn you into*

*That helmet looks like it was loud to put on*

*MFer brought a tommy gun to a fighting tournament*

*You have the mysterious urge to buy a Chupa Chups branded confection*

*Hell yeah, I want to see the individual voxels*

What’s Next

We now get to move on with our lives, at least to some extent. For the next several entries we’re going to alternate between the Sega Saturn in the late Summer of 1996 and the Atari Jaguar in 1995. We’ll stop with the Jag when we get up to the launch of the Jaguar CD to switch over to the 3DO games for which I have release dates. After that, we’ll finish out the Jag in 1995 before switching again to close out the 3DO in ’95. There are only a handful of posts worth of post ’95 releases for both these systems combined, so I’ll save the next round ups until after I finish out their catalogs. I’m trying to time everything to where all five systems in this generation hit 12/31/1996 at the same time in my coverage. We’ll see how well that goes.

Regardless, next time we’re going to pick back up with the Saturn in July 1996 with NHL Powerplay ’96, Galaxy Fight, DecAthlete, and The Legend of Oasis.

You can find me streaming sometimes over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. Those streams have us looking over the games covered in these entries along with whatever other nonsense I have going on, such as my effort to play through every PS1 JRPG and my crippling obsession with Tokyo Xtreme Racer.

Also, I’m on Bluesky now because I’ve convinced myself that I need to learn self-promotion.

I also randomly appear like a cryptid over on the Deep Listens podcast network. Be sure to check out their podcasts about obscure RPGs, real video games, old anime, and (rarely) Canadian football!

Sources:

“https://web.archive.org/web/20150725185700/http://www.toyo.ac.jp/uploaded/attachment/3049.pdf“

https://www.scribd.com/doc/208776076/Screen-Digest?secret_password=2ntzw5zfrtsy8kxequmg

https://archive.org/details/GamePro_Issue_064_November_1994/page/n279/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/Computer_Gaming_World_Issue_114/page/n73/mode/2up?view=theater

https://web.archive.org/web/20150526093407/http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/20/business/3do-sales-called-pleasing.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20200831085505/https://retrocdn.net/images/9/92/GamePro_US_060.pdf

https://archive.org/details/AtariCorporationAnnualReport1994/page/n13/mode/2up

https://archive.gamehistory.org/item/e3dcd4ce-e592-4de6-b6d9-f0af53995049