After a year in which it all but disappeared following its exit from the hardware business, games company 3DO Inc re-emerged yesterday at the E3 show in Atlanta, Georgia claiming to be a leaner and meaner software only production studio. Company founder and CEO Trip Hawkins, who also founded the much more successful Electronic Arts Inc before forming 3DO in 1991, said the firm had spent most of 1997 organizing itself to follow a similar pattern of development and management as entertainment production studios, putting new management in place and bringing all modes of production in-house rather than relying on freelance developers. Redwood City-based 3DO will now concentrate on fantasy role-playing and strategy games, action strategy games, baseball, and other such time-tested genres. At the show, the company was showing games for the PC, Sony Playstation and Nintendo N64. 3DO sold its hardware systems business to Samsung Electronics Co for $20m last April (CI No 3,150) and its M2 interactive graphics processing technology to Matsushita Electric Industrial Co in August (CI No 3,216).
