In 1995, Topps D-III Was Supposed to Change the Hobby Forever

Back in the July 1995 issue of Sports Cards Magazine, Greg Ambrosius introduced collectors to an ambitious new Topps product with an equally ambitious headline: The New Three-Dimensional Card Brand From Topps, Which Represents Breakthrough Technology, Could Change the Card Hobby Forever.

D-III – Sports Cards Magazine, July ’95 (p. 58)

D-III – Sports Cards Magazine, July ’95 (p. 59)

The article is a fantastic time capsule because Topps was really high on D-III. The company had been working on the concept for years and believed its new technology represented a major leap beyond earlier 3-D cards, including Topps’ own 1968 3-D test issue and Kellogg’s familiar 3-D cards of the 1970s and ’80s.

Topps executive Steve Kosoff told Sports Cards that collectors could see true depth without special glasses or having to tilt the card, while marketing director Bob Aniello predicted the product had “incredible potential within the hobby.”

And Topps had big plans. The article says baseball would be followed by D-III products in football, basketball, and hockey, with hockey possibly getting D-III chase cards as soon as the following year.

That, of course, is not how things turned out.

The baseball product was delayed until October and consisted of just 59 base cards and six Zone inserts. At $5 for a five-card hobby pack, with no rookies, little else to chase, and Pinnacle’s competing UC3 product selling for considerably less, D-III bombed. The planned second baseball series and football set were canceled.

Thirty-one years later, though, that failure makes the original article much more fun to read. And the good news is that D-III certainly didn’t become expensive with age: you can still pick up unopened boxes for under $40 on eBay.

Happy collecting!

P.S. There’s another D-III rabbit hole I’ve started digging into: the prototype/promo cards that TCDB catalogs as “1995 Topps New Product Development IIID Technology.” TCDB lists an 11-card multi-sport group, and these are far less junky than the eventual production cards. More on those after I do some deeper digging.