Digital Trends
Infinium Labs, a company often referred to as producing "vaporware", may have struggled getting their Phantom game console to market, but some good has come from the system in the form of their Lapboard. Part keyboard and part mouse, the Lapboard was first shown as a part of the Infinium Labs Phantom game console system which ultimately failed to make it to market.
Quote from the article:
“When I was handed the combo to demo Unreal Tournament 2004, I literally could feel no discernable difference between playing the game on my PC at home and using the Phantom. This is a great thing, folks. For the first time ever, I could sit down casually on a sofa and frag the night away on a huge big screen TV with all the precision that the combo affords. It is a dream come true.
New details of Infinium Labs’ plans for the Phantom Game Service have emerged, with company president Kevin Bachus revealing that the Phantom console will effectively be free, and providing the first pictures of the hardware itself.
Describing the pricing decision as “something we had to do,” Bachus told US website GameDaily that the hardware would be provided free of charge to consumers who sign up for the Phantom Gaming Service, the broadband game and game-related content delivery system on which the console – which has no external disc drives – relies.
There are over 500 games and edutainment titles from over 60 publishers in the line-up.
It’s an impressive list in terms of sheer size, and includes fairly significant software support from publishers including Atari, Capcom, Take Two, Ubi Soft and Strategy First, as well as education software from key publishers including Riverdeep.
However, closer examination shows that few publishers have committed recent AAA software to the line-up, and with a few notable exceptions – Atari and Strategy First, in particular, seem to have included a number of recent major titles – the whole line-up reads like a listing of PC budget titles.
Indeed, even the specification of the device remains unclear – the company promises “up to” a 3.0ghz processor and 256mb RAM, along with “high-performance” NVIDIA graphics card and Intel motherboard – but what the actual specifications of the components will be is anybody’s guess.
What the unveiling does confirm is that the device is going to be large – at least as big as the Xbox, and probably bigger given the reliance on off the shelf components – and will feature some upgradeable parts, with the ability to add additional storage (alongside the “100+ Gigabyte” hard drive – again a rather vague spec) or memory, and components such as DSL or Cable modems or wireless LAN devices.
Infinium Labs has changed the date for the public unveiling of its Phantom networked PC gaming device following the sudden postponement of the Ultimate Gamers Expo, choosing now to reveal the device online instead.
Interested parties will be able to see the Phantom for the first time at Phantom.net on Monday August 18th – it launches on Sunday August 17th at midnight stateside.
“Due to the sudden postponement of the Ultimate Gamers Expo, Infinium Labs will unveil the Phantom game console on line at midnight on Sunday, August 17th, at www.phantom.net,” explained Infinium CEO Timothy M. Roberts. “We also will explore the opportunity to exhibit the Phantom game console at COMDEX, the global technology marketplace trade show that takes place November 17th – 20th, 2003, in Las Vegas.”
A lengthy article on tech news site Newsforge goes into considerable detail about the system and its business model, which focuses entirely on delivering existing content over secure channels rather than promoting development of exclusive content for the system.
At least $25 million of venture capital has been put behind the project and its creators, Infinium Labs, and the end result appears to be essentially a Windows XP PC with no CD or floppy drive, running an assortment of proprietary software to provide encryption for data on the hard drive and secure downloading of content across broadband networks.
For those who don’t recall, the Phantom was announced to a wave of scepticism some time ago; the device purports to be a network-enabled console with a massive library of software which will be available over broadband.
The system will, according to Infinium, be the fastest console on the market when it launches in 2004, and will feature a selection of pre-loaded software. It’s thought that the console will effectively be a PC in a sleek box with some custom software to provide a simple user interface; the games it runs will be PC titles.
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