PO'ed

Lore & Background

PO'ed was developed by Any Channel, a company founded in July 1993 by former employees of Sun Microsystems. Development began in October 1993 as a spare-time project.

The developers looked at games like Doom, Marathon, and Dark Forces, taking what they felt were their best elements, but wanted to move away from tunnel-based environments, creating open and non-formulaic levels. The team originally planned to include a motorcycle and a tank for the player to ride, but could not incorporate them into the level designs. On May 23, 1995, The 3DO Company entered an agreement with Any Channel to distribute the game in North America and publish it elsewhere for three years, starting with PO'ed.

The game features 26 levels filled with alien monsters. The player uses primitive weapons like a frying pan and a drill, as well as futuristic alien weapons.

A jet pack allows the player to accelerate skyward when the jump button is pressed; releasing the button causes the character to fall. The jet pack does not allow hovering, but the player can maintain altitude by rhythmically tapping the button. The plot involves a chef whose spacecraft crash-lands on an alien world, and he must escape.

Conception and the Vulture Cartoons

Trip Hawkins, the man who built Electronic Arts into a gaming giant, grew increasingly frustrated by the fragmentation of the software development landscape. Every platform demanded its own incompatible toolset, and Hawkins envisioned a unified standard to replace that chaos. His creative spark came from an unexpected source: a cartoon he had seen pinned to a wall at his former employer, Apple Computer, depicting two vultures perched on a branch, one suggesting they kill their prey rather than wait for a carcass to appear. That image of taking initiative rather than scavenging lingered in his mind for years.

By 1989, Hawkins had found the right engineering partners in Dave Needle and RJ Mical, the duo behind the Atari Lynx. Their hardware architecture, sketched initially on a restaurant napkin, aligned so closely with Hawkins' own philosophy that he chose to collaborate rather than build from scratch. The project was formally spun out of EA as The 3DO Company on September 12, 1991. The name was a double entendre: an abbreviation for "three-dimensional optics" and a playful nod to "audio" and "video." A working prototype was unveiled at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in January 1993, where its graphical output stunned attendees and drew comparisons that industry analysts called unprecedented for the era.

The Licensing Gamble

The 3DO Company never intended to build its own consoles. Lacking manufacturing resources, it pursued a licensing strategy, approaching every major electronics maker it could find. Its chief targets were Sony and Matsushita (now Panasonic), the two largest consumer electronics firms in the world. Sony, however, had already committed to developing its own PlayStation and declined.

Sega, according to former CEO Tom Kalinske, entered serious negotiations but ultimately passed due to cost concerns. Matsushita, seeking to protect its investment in MCA Inc. and its Universal Pictures subsidiary, agreed to partner and launched the first 3DO console, the Panasonic FZ-1, in 1993. Goldstar and Sanyo followed with their own models.

Samsung, Toshiba, and AT&T also obtained licenses but never shipped units; AT&T went so far as to build prototypes and display them at the January 1994 CES. The business model offered publishers a mere three-dollar royalty per game, far below what Nintendo and Sega charged. But the flip side was that each manufacturer had to turn a profit on the hardware itself, unlike Sega and Sony, which sold consoles at a loss and recouped through software. The result was a $699 launch price that placed the 3DO firmly in premium territory, though later models from Goldstar and Sanyo came in at significantly lower cost.

A Standard That Never Caught Fire

Hawkins had a grand vision: the 3DO would become the VHS of gaming, a common standard promoted by multiple manufacturers against any single competitor. He pointed to NEC's failure with TurboGrafx as evidence that even large companies struggled as new entrants, and he believed Sony would have fared better partnering with others than fighting alone. The Atari Jaguar, by contrast, was dismissed as merely "slightly better than a 16-bit system," and the Philips CD-i was considered already obsolete. The hardware itself was genuinely impressive, built around a 32-bit ARM60 processor and a custom graphics chip.

It was initially marketed as a multimedia platform before pivoting to pure gaming within a year of launch. The system even earned the distinction of Time magazine's "1993 Product of the Year." Yet none of that was enough. The high price, an oversaturated console market, and mixed critical reviews conspired to keep sales far below the levels achieved by Sega and Sony's competing machines. By 1996, the format was discontinued.

The Long Goodbye

The 3DO's final chapter was marked by a series of asset sales that underscored how far the project had fallen from its original ambitions. In 1996, the format was officially discontinued, ending what had been a highly publicized but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to reshape the console landscape. The following year, The 3DO Company sold its "Opera" hardware division to Samsung Electronics. That deal came just a year after the company had offloaded its M2 successor hardware to Panasonic, the very manufacturer that had introduced the world to the 3DO in 1993.

The trajectory tells a story of a bold idea—unified, multi-manufacturer, CD-based gaming—constrained by the economic realities of a market where the dominant players were willing to lose money on hardware to lock in software revenue. The 3DO's licensing model, while attractive to publishers with its low per-game royalty, could not overcome the structural disadvantage of requiring each partner to profit on the console itself. What began as a restaurant-napkin sketch and a vulture cartoon became, within five years, a series of corporate divestitures.

Reader's Guide

PO'ed met with polarized opinions among critics. Reviewing the 3DO version, Scarry Larry of GamePro noted serious control problems, with the character often careening off edges or failing to turn, but concluded the game sufficiently filled the role of first-person shooter for the 3DO, citing unique weapons, aggressive enemy AI, humor, and strong graphics. Maximum summarized the game as the worst 3D action title ever seen on any format except PlayStation's Crime Crackers and some early PC public domain games, citing glitching environments, untextured floors, feeble humor, pixelated enemies, and poor controls. Next Generation noted the game's 'labor of love' nature was both a blessing and a curse, playing smoothly and standing out from other shooters, but with over-designed levels and intricate textures that made it confusing.

Reviewing the PlayStation version, most Electronic Gaming Monthly reviewers found PO'ed dull with nothing to set it apart except humor that quickly wears thin, and criticized the lack of improvement over the 3DO version. Mike Desmond dissented, calling it an all-around good title ranking highly with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, praising detailed graphics, topsy-turvy level designs, and large weapon selection. GamePro's Slo Mo said the game lacks terror and atmosphere but does a nice job tip-toeing between fierce and funny, highlighting aggressive AI and unique weapons. Next Generation said the PlayStation version retains the bizarre style and overall experience while making it easier to play due to better controls and graphics that more clearly delineate the intricate levels.