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Hawkins has been scrambling ever since. He cut the price twice, once in February to $499 and again in September to $399, sweetening the deal for his hardware manufacturers by giving them a couple of shares of 3DO stock for every machine they sold. He hounded game developers to write more software and, when they didn't respond fast enough, started developing his own. When money ran short, he put up $12.5 million from his own savings.
In the end 3DO was saved by the sheer marketing muscle of its Japanese manufacturing partner, Matsushita, which aggressively pushed 3DO machines through company-owned stores and sold roughly two boxes in Japan for every one in the U.S. Those sales bought Hawkins enough time to get the second generation of software in place, including some flashy new titles such as Road Rash and FIFA Soccer. He still doesn't have that killer application -- a Mario Bros., say -- that could turn it into a machine game players feel they have to own. But he's got a few months to find one before Sega and Sony -- and possibly Nintendo -- land in the U.S. with their next-generation systems.
The wild card in all this is the flood of new games published on CD-ROMs for personal computers. Having languished on computer-store shelves for nearly a decade, CD-ROM's for Macintosh and IBM-compatible PCs are suddenly taking off. "Trip got blindsided by CD-ROMs," says John Taylor, an analyst at L.H. Alton, a San Francisco-based investment firm. "People who bought PCs for all sorts of reasons are saying, 'I just spent $2,500 for my multimedia computer. Why should I spend $400 on a dedicated game machine?' "
Hawkins' strategy is to stay just ahead of his competitors -- whether they are PCs, CD-ROMs or video-game systems. So his next project is a plug-in device called the M2 that turns the 32-bit 3DO into a 64-bit system -- yet still plays all the old software. That's if he makes it through Christmas.