My Embarrassing 3DO Game Reviews

Long long ago, even before I was developing games as a career, I was an early adopter of and loved the 3DO (I was a bit of a fanboy). I had just started my first real job with real paychecks (as an advanced systems engineer at Microsoft in Redmond) and bought the console and every game as it was released. I was convinced the platform deserved way more credit than it was getting, so I decided to write what I considered "grown up professional reviews" of various 3DO games. I honestly don't recall how they got picked up by GameBytes Magazine (one of the early digital gaming zines in the 90s). I vaguely recall them finding my earlier reviews somehow and asking me to write some exclusively for their magazine

My reviews were, in retrospect, extremely extremely fanboy-flattering and simple with very little actual opinion honestly... lots of specs and details with random smileys everywhere :). But somehow they were actually published and still exist out in the ether. It was also during that time that the 3DO became the platform where I took my first stab at indepenedent game development every evening and weekend.

In a weird way, these silly reviews were one of the earliest seeds that grew into my decades long career in game development.

These are those reviews, reproduced exactly as they originally ran. Click into any of them for the full text, plus a few images of the actual games for anyone who (understandably) has no idea what a 3DO was.

You can also experience them in their original DOS executable format here.... https://www.dosgames.com/gamebytes.php (use the "view in browser" links for maximum satisfaction)

(Hover for titles, click to dive in)