by The 3DO hardware has something of a complicated legacy.
Developed and conceived by The 3DO Company's CEO, Trip Hawkins, who had risen to fame as the Electronic Arts' original founder, it took a slightly different approach from the other consoles available at the time. Rather than existing as a single product, it was designed as a hardware format that other companies could license, allowing them to manufacture and market their own versions of the platform.
Throughout the early '90s, it was regularly promoted in magazines as the next big thing in gaming, with the technology earning a number of accolades from publications such as Time Magazine. However, shortly after its release, it was quickly overshadowed by the competition, leading it to become something of a footnote in the console wars that followed between Sony, Sega, and Nintendo. Despite this, though, it has become popular among collectors, and also has a pretty interesting homebrew scene, which still produces new games and demos for 3DO platforms to this day.
The latest example of this is Terminus, the brand-new first-person shooter from Retro Love Letter, which came to my attention earlier this week thanks to its latest trailer, uploaded to YouTube yesterday.
In Terminus, players take control of a space pirate who has picked up a distress beacon from a nearby spacecraft and decides to investigate, hoping for an easy payday, but soon finds more than they bargained for as the crew have all been transformed into monsters. It immediately calls to mind '90s shooters like DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D, and is built on a game engine programmed from the ground up without the use of AI, which was reportedly inspired in part by the 3DO title Killing Time.
In addition to this, the game is also said to feature the voice talents of Thessaly Lerner, AKA, Lisa Garland from the original Silent Hill, as well as a soundtrack from the musician Ed Wilson, and makes use of trapexit's 3DO development tools.
"Textures were hand-made by a pixel artist," Retro Love Letter wrote about the project in the video descriptions. "Weapons and game objects were digitised from custom 3D-printed models, and screen-captures produced using 3D modelling software."
They continued, "Both NTSC and PAL are supported. (PAL is only being tested via emulation). On real hardware, the game is currently able to achieve approximately 30 FPS for most gameplay... The game uses 3D, quad-based polygons with digitised assets. Its sector-based engine is similar to DOOM, with no perceived level loading. You can traverse the ship across multiple maps seamlessly."
According to Retro Love Letter, the game is now "in testing" with plans for a physical release in the future. You can follow the developer on Twitter/X to keep up to date on any updates.