Phantom Console Is No More. Never Was
Remember the Phantom game console? The wonder that was to compete with the PS2 and Xbox? It has been in development (read: delayed) for a very long time, actually it doesn’t even exist. Only plastic models like the above one.
Now the company behind Phantom, Phantom Entertainment (former Infinum Labs), has finally admitted that the console in fact does now exits (they still didn’t admit the whole thing was a PR stunt), and that they are focusing on a broadband game delivery service for Windows and Windows Media Center. It will feature some sort of hardware lapboard controller.
On the website, you’ll find this encouraging statement:
“The Phantom Game Service is anticipated to be the first end-to-end, on-demand game service delivering online games directly to your living room or any comfortable setting in your home or workplace,”
“Delivered over broadband, the Phantom Game Service is designed to offer casual and avid gamers a broad library of titles, available anytime, day or night. The Phantom Game Service was originally engineered to run on a Windows XP embedded operating system on a Phantom Game Receiver managed by Phantom content servers over the Internet.”
Head over to their site and see if they can convince you to spend $130 on a “gaming” keyboard.
August 17th, 2006 at 1:18 am
[...] Source DigitalBattle [...]
August 17th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Will people believe the lie again?
The day Phantom was announced: WOW!
The day after that: @%*%$@*$&* IT’S FAKE!!!!
Today: WOW! (Again…)
Tomorrow:@#¨@%*$@%* IT’S ALSO A FAKE!!!!
Someday: WOW!…
People are just dumb, someone who lies once lies many other times
August 18th, 2006 at 2:28 am
Phantom? Funny. I thought they were referring to the PSP2!
September 11th, 2006 at 9:23 pm
The Phantom does really have a clear goal, but not the one people have been told – it’s really a pump and dump that is to benefit the owners of Infinium Labs stock should its value ever manage to increase. Though with Penny Arcade and HardOCP on their collective asses, one can only hope that will never happen.
September 13th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
penny arcade has no skill in anything but art critising (which they do badly anyway). They take there frustrations out on companies like phatom Entertianment because they are more succesful in life then they will ever be.
September 14th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
I’m, ah, gonna have to go ahead and disagree with your analysis there, Mr. X. Given the hugely broad range of things Penny Arcade bitches about, Infinium or Phantom Entertainment or whichever have occupied the tiniest part of it. Only when Phantom would rise up with their greatest marketing efforts did they get a comic and perhaps a paragraph’s worth of material dedicated to them. Other than idle amusement, Phantom Entertainment is really inconsequential.
As to your implied charge that the people behind Phantom Entertainment are highly successful “in life,” I’m must admit a sort macabre curiousity as to what could possibly give you that impression. After all, their founder is currently under the SEC for defrauding the government and investors of at *least* $400,000, and that’s only the obvious stuff. He’s had a history of doing nothing but running company after company into the ground. Kevin Bachus, their CEO and physical manifestation of the only shred of credibility they ever had, slunk away last year without even reporting where he was going. His now-shot reputation, if widely reported, could bring his new company’s stock down. Phantom Entertainment’s employees, for a good while there (maybe still) were being paid with penny-stock instead of, you know, money, so that’s not terribly successful. So: You have a founder who smells terribly much like a scam artist and who is, at best, a complete incompetent. A CEO that accomplished nothing but pulling in a few more foolish investors that don’t understand the industry before he jumped ship to save what little bit of credibility he had left. You have employees that haven’t been paid. A company that is a laughing stock. A product that never existed. An *office* that never existed. Millions of dollars in debt. And don’t forget that the founder just may be put in prison for fifteen years by next year if isn’t *real* lucky.
Now, the thing I wonder is how you could possibly think that this was success? I mean, damn, I’d hate to see your idea of failure. No money, no respect, no honor, not a damned thing, and there’s a winner? Did you get invested in them, Mr. X? Were you so naive as to believe their lies? It’s kinda sweet, you know. That in a world like this there could be an innocence like yours. Ah well, though. It’s really for the best, it’ll save you some pain from the next shock: The Easter Bunny, Mr. X? It ain’t real. It’s a lie. And Santa and Elves? Hate to say it, but they never existed either. Take care of yourself, pal, wake up and smell the ashes. It’s a hard, nasty world.
Best get used to it.
.L
September 19th, 2006 at 9:33 pm
MrX = Pwned. Put everything aside and basicly you have a system that has been in development since 2002, more than $62,700,000 have been spent developing an item the doesn’t even exist and thier so called CEO is under investigation by the U.S. government for fraud.
Penny Arcade? Even if you don’t like thier comments, style or opinions you have to admit one thing, they have used thier succes to raise over $600,000 for children hospitals last year and expect to do even more this year.
That’s alot more than Timothy Roberts can say, he will probably be spending the next quater of his life under the jail when the SEC gets done with him. Tim Roberts a succes?
Your attack on PA is completly misinformed and dripping with ignorance. It’s rather obvious a misdirected insult like that originates from envy.
-The Count
September 19th, 2006 at 11:18 pm
Mr X, it’s ridiculous to discount the facts about Timothy Roberts and Infinium Labs based on your opinion of Penny Arcade. Did you also discount the charges about Enron based on the crappy writers at Saturday Night Live?
December 28th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
Does their gaming keyboard even exist? If a company can’t even make a keyboard then you know there’s a problem.
The “gaming service” sounds suspiciously like this other game downloading service I use all the time, its called the Internet.
December 28th, 2006 at 9:54 pm
We know their keyboard definately exists (They’ve let people demo it at E3 2005 and one of the CES shows, it just hasn’t been put on an assembly line and cranked out in the numbers necessary for a nation-wide product release. For the most part, simple as the thing is, most people were fairly impressed with their lapboard/mouse design-thing. What I wonder is why no company worth a damn has come out with a similar concept. It’s a good idea, but I loathe the idea of giving that company the slightest bit of money.
.TFM