Gizmondo

» see gizmondo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

gizmondo was the kind of thing you read about in retrospectives and assume someone made up. tiger telematics, a small uk-listed company, announced a handheld game console in 2003 and shipped it in the uk on march 19 2005. the spec sheet was actually ambitious: a samsung arm cpu, an nvidia gpu, gps, a gprs sim slot, a camera, sd card storage, and bluetooth. for 2005 that was a more loaded device than the psp or the ds. the price was 229 pounds in the uk and 400 dollars in the us.

the business model was the part that did not make sense. the device had two retail tiers. the cheaper version, the "smart ads" version at 229 dollars in the us, displayed location-aware advertising on the screen via the gprs connection. you got the device subsidized in exchange for being marketed to while you played. the more expensive ad-free version was 400. nobody bought either tier. distribution in the us was through mall kiosks, which was a strategy borrowed from the late nineties pretzel-and-cell-phone-kiosk era and was already obsolete by 2005.

the game library shipped with eight us titles at launch and never grew much beyond that. development relationships with major publishers had been promised in press releases but mostly did not materialize. tiger telematics had reportedly already sunk close to 300 million dollars into the project by the time the us launch happened. the company announced a widescreen successor weeks before the original device had finished shipping in the us, which killed whatever interest the existing model still had. by february 2006 the company was in liquidation and the device was off store shelves.

the post-shutdown story is what kept gizmondo alive in memory. stefan eriksson, the company's vice president, was revealed by swedish press in late 2005 to have been a member of the uppsala mafia with prior convictions in sweden. in february 2006 eriksson crashed a leased ferrari enzo on the pacific coast highway at 162 miles per hour. he initially told police that a german man named "dietrich" had been driving and fled the scene. the story did not hold up. eriksson served two years in a us prison and was deported. the wreckage of the enzo became a small internet artifact of the era.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

i never saw a gizmondo in person. by 2005 i was an undergrad in turkey running a desktop with a 17 inch crt and not paying much attention to handheld consoles at all. the psp launched the same month as gizmondo in europe and got all the press in the gaming magazines i was reading. the nintendo ds had launched in europe a few weeks earlier. gizmondo was barely a name. the uk launch was at a 2.5 million pound party at the park lane hilton with sting performing, which got more press coverage in the financial pages than in the gaming press.

~ the executive scandal ~

the eriksson story turned gizmondo from a failed handheld into a true-crime artifact. the swedish daily expressen broke the story in october 2005 that several of tiger telematics' executives, including eriksson and peter uf, were associated with the swedish organized-crime group known as the uppsala mafia. eriksson had a 1993 swedish prison sentence for counterfeiting that he had not disclosed to investors. the disclosure ended whatever credibility the company had with the london stock exchange and the company's share price collapsed.

the ferrari enzo crash happened on february 21 2006, fifteen days after liquidation was announced. eriksson was driving a 1.4 million dollar leased enzo on the pacific coast highway in malibu. the car hit a power pole at 162 mph and split in half. eriksson walked away with a cut on his lip and a blood alcohol level over the limit. he told the responding deputy that the driver was a german man named dietrich who had escaped on foot. there was no dietrich. he was eventually convicted of grand theft and drunk driving, and the dietrich story collapsed under questioning.

~ the legacy ~

the gizmondo unit itself was a piece of hardware that mostly worked. the games that did ship, including a port of colors and an original platformer called classic compendium, ran fine. the gps and gprs functions worked when there was a signal. the device was not technically a disaster. it was a financial and managerial disaster strapped to a competent piece of consumer electronics. a small community of collectors keeps gizmondos running and produces homebrew software. the device is the kind of thing that shows up at retro game conventions priced at a few hundred dollars because the failure narrative is more valuable than the hardware. the ferrari enzo wreckage is in a private collection.

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