Basically, I don't want to put anything on the 'net which could be considered libellous or defamatory, but the general conclusion that we reached, rightly or wrongly, was that the main cause for the failure was managerial, although I can't say precisely where. Either the company had insufficient resource to tackle all its projects, or the resource could have been better allocated. Certainly MM9 had to be marketed before it was ready - IIRC one of the team said that it really needed about 2 months further work - but for financial reasons, it had to go on sale in that financial year. Predictably, it was buggy, and the reviewers shot it down in flames. (I was never interested in 3DO's other games, like Army Men and so on, and I've no idea what happened to them.)

One can speculate about the reasons for the resource misfit, and of course one of them is that there was not enough cash coming in to support the effort necessary. The loss of income to pirated copies cannot have helped.

From what I heard, JVC was involved in MM9 at the beginning, but very quickly ceased to have any significant input. Again, one can speculate why... Managerial problems? Loss of interest? We understood that his vision for future CRPG games was in a net-based multiuser environment, and the reason he went to 3DO was that NWC lacked the resources to push this forward. But it never happened.

I read a SF book years ago, I think written by Bertram Chandler, that started with the sentence "When the dreamer dies, what of the dream?" and finishing with "When the dream dies, what of the dreamer?" And I think about JVC, and I wonder what happened to his dream.