History has not been too kind to it, but when 3DO was announced it seemed pretty exciting. The footage they showed (well, pics, as it was all magazines back then) looked to be a major step above everything else, and the console's pedigree sounded like it might have a good shot at making some space for itself. The only other real Western hardware platform of note at the time was Atari's Jaguar, and that seemed pretty DOA. At least this thing seemed genuinely ambitious. I remember they got one in at the local second-hand game store not long after launch, and ogling at what was happening on the screen. It was obviously early, but compared to what we'd been looking at on SNES and Sega CD, these games looked like a true generational leap.
But then immediately after this, all that happened was basically... nothing. You'd go to Electronics Bougeek and there would be nothing interesting sitting on the shelf. 2 Putt Putt games? A Dennis Miller News "game?" That was all well and good, but if there was no actual fancy software besides this edutainment and multimedia drivel, it was basically impossible to feel any kind of excitement over this thing. The insane price tag was just the icing on the cake. Neo Geo cost megabucks as well, but at least it had tons of amazing looking games that you might actually WANT to play.
Lastly, beyond the initial expression of enthusiasm, coverage of the thing understandably fried up in the media immediately (as there was not really much to actually talk about, other than "wouldn't it be cool if..."). It felt crazy to think that a couple of generations earlier, NES could launch with a whole solid lineup of a variety of different games, and now we finally had this amazing tech that was just a shiny box with nothing really going on.
