Indrema

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

~ the obit ~

Nothing shipped. Indrema Corporation existed for fifteen months and put a complete set of specifications in front of the gaming press, and then it closed without a single unit reaching anybody's shelf. That is the whole shape of this one, and it is the reason it is worth burying rather than filing under vaporware.

John Gildred founded the company in Alameda, California in january 2000 and announced the Indrema Entertainment System that march. The machine was called the L600 and the pitch was Linux. Every other console of that generation charged a developer ten thousand dollars or more for a kit and a license before they were allowed to compile anything at all. Indrema was going to hand the development environment out for free, on the grounds that the operating system underneath it was already free and there was no reason to tax the people making the games.

On paper the hardware was serious. A 750 MHz AMD Duron, a GeForce 3 rated at 120 to 180 million polygons per second, ninety-six megabytes of memory, a ten gigabyte drive that took an upgrade to fifty. It played DVDs and pushed HDTV output up to 1080i. Two hundred and ninety-nine dollars, thirty titles at launch. It would also record television the way a TiVo did, and pull new games down over something called the Indrema Game Channel.

The launch date moved from the 2000 holiday season to summer 2001 and then past it. On 6 april 2001 Gildred told a chat session that Indrema needed more than ten million dollars in capital to continue and had not raised it. His advice for anyone attempting the same thing afterward was to finish the product before talking about it.

I was seventeen in april 2001, on a dial-up line in Turkey, and the L600 was out of reach twice over. There was no Turkish distributor for a 299 dollar American console, which is the boring half. The interesting half is that the part of the machine I would have wanted, the part that downloaded games instead of making me find a disc, needed a household broadband connection. That did not arrive in my apartment until around 2006. Indrema described a console I could not have bought and could not have used.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch ~

The argument Indrema was making was about who gets to write a game. Sony and Nintendo each ran a gate in 2000 and Microsoft was in the middle of building one, and the gate was the business: approved studios, signed kits, per-disc royalties. Indrema's answer was that a box running Linux does not need a gate. The SDK would cost nothing, the source would be open, and the company would make its money selling hardware and taking a cut of the channel instead of renting permission out to developers.

Read in 2026 that is an entirely ordinary set of ideas, which is the strange thing about going back through the press material. Digital storefronts, free tooling, indie developers publishing without a license. Indrema wrote all of it down in 2000 and could not raise the money to build the box it needed to be true on.

~ the cracks ~

Announcing early is what killed it, by the founder's own account, and the mechanism is easy to see. The specifications were public for more than a year before there was anything to sell. Every month of slippage was a month of the PlayStation 2 selling units into the market Indrema was describing. Sony's machine reached North America in october 2000 while the L600 was still a document with a price on it.

The hardware promise had a moving target problem underneath it too. A GeForce 3 inside a 299 dollar console in early 2000 is a very different claim from the same part in the same box in late 2001, and Indrema kept revising the specification upward while leaving the price where it was. From outside, that reads as a company that had not finished deciding what it was building.

~ what really happened ~

There was no bankruptcy filing worth reading and no dramatic collapse. Indrema simply reached the end of what it could raise and stopped. The site came down, the developer list that had signed up for free kits scattered, and what survives is a specification sheet plus a run of previews for a machine no reviewer ever held.

The idea outlived the company by a wide margin. Ouya took roughly the same argument to Kickstarter in 2012, raised 8.6 million dollars from more than sixty thousand people, actually shipped, and failed anyway. Valve put Linux under a living room box with Steam Machines in 2015 and got nowhere with it. The version that finally worked was the Steam Deck in 2022, and it works because it stopped pretending to be a console and admitted it was a handheld PC.

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