Army Men
The green plastic soldiers from the toy bin, given a voice, a war and a portal into the "real world" of kitchen counters and backyards. 3DO's Army Men started as a 1998 PC strategy game and became a franchise that ran to more than two dozen titles in a decade, most of them shipped by 3DO in its last five years.
The 3DO Company, co-founded by Trip Hawkins, first planned Army Men for Panasonic's cancelled M2 hardware and showed it at E3 in 1997. It arrived on Windows on April 30, 1998 as a real-time tactics game: you were Sarge of the Green Army, fighting the Tans across Desert, Alpine and Bayou regions until the final mission opened a portal into the "Real World." Producer Chris Wilson later explained that the plastic-soldier conceit had a practical origin: toy men avoided censorship problems with Germany's USK ratings board. Next Generation called it "a solid, fun example of the genre" with "a very nice graphic twist," and it averaged 61% on GameRankings.
Then 3DO found that the toy-box angle sold. Army Men II (March 1999) fought in both the plastic and real worlds, Army Men 3D brought Sarge to the PlayStation on March 10, 1999 and was the ninth-best-selling game that April, and Army Men: Sarge's Heroes on the Nintendo 64 (September 28, 1999), then PlayStation and Dreamcast in 2000, gave the series its most remembered form: Colonel Grimm's Greens against General Plastro's Tans, through portals into our world, with the men of Bravo Company to rescue. The N64 and PlayStation versions sold a combined 1.3 million copies despite reviews in the 49–62% range.
That was the pattern. The franchise ran to more than two dozen games in a decade, most of them from 3DO between 1998 and 2003; Michael Mendheim recalled executives pressing the team to ship a new one every quarter, and Official UK PlayStation Magazine scored six of them 3/10 or lower. Hawkins himself wrote to GamePro to defend the spin-off Portal Runner. 3DO controlled the line from 1998 to 2003, Global Star Software carried it from 2003 to 2007, and 2K inherited it when it bought Global Star, keeping the brand alive in fits and starts through 2017.
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