Late last week, apparent pictures of a rare Sony/Nintendo "Play Station" SNES CD-ROM prototype surfaced on the Internet, proving that even an unreleased vaporware console can still exist in some physical form. Inspired by that revelation, an Ars reader has come forward with pictures of another physical relic of gaming's vaporware past—a functional prototype of Infinium's infamous Phantom console.
If you didn't follow gaming closely in the early 2000s, you might not know (or remember) the long, sad saga of the Infinium Phantom. First announced in 2002, the Phantom was a "revolutionary" effort to bring the modularity and power of a PC to the living room TV. Infinium promised the Phantom would be able to stream games over a broadband connection, a plan that companies like OnLive would find more or less unworkable even a decade later.
The Phantom's name turned out to be prescient. Though the company dragged out its vaporware promises through a few years of defamation lawsuits and trade show presentations, the console never came to market. By 2006, Infinium had suffered $73 million in losses and its CEO was facing SEC charges for a pump-and-dump stock scheme. Infinium did eventually release one product, a keyboard/mouse lapboard meant for living room PC gamers. It got savaged by reviewers and failed to make a big market impact.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment