Phantom Entertainment

» see phantom.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Infinium Labs Operating Corporation was formed in Delaware on 9 December 2002 by Tim Roberts, who had co-founded Savvis before it, and set up at 2033 Main Street in Sarasota, Florida. In January 2003 it announced that it would enter the console market with a broadband machine called the Phantom, to be unveiled in March and in American shops by November. No price came with the announcement.

The design was genuinely pointed at where the industry went. The company's own filing describes an Intel-compatible processor with a DirectX 9 class graphics chip and a hard disk, running Windows XP Embedded, in a box that used no discs or cartridges of any kind, with everything downloaded over the network. By the 2004 annual report the business model had numbers on it: $299.95 for the Phantom Game Receiver, a one-time $19.99 activation fee, $19.95 a month on a two-year commitment, and up to ten games a month from a library the company said ran past two hundred titles. Atari and Codemasters were among the publishers it listed as signed.

November 2003 passed, and then the holiday season of 2004, and then every date after that. A prototype appeared at E3 in May 2004 and was widely assumed to be a shell. Wired News had ranked the Phantom third in its Vaporware list for 2003; in January 2005 it gave the console first place for 2004, ahead of Microsoft's Longhorn. In August 2006 the company dropped the hardware entirely, and the console disappeared from its own website.

The accounts are the part worth reading twice. Revenue was zero in every year the company existed. By the last quarterly report it ever filed, for the period ending 31 March 2007, the accumulated deficit stood at $72,843,481 against cash on hand of $16,831 and total assets of $18,831. Of that deficit only $15,705,055 was cash actually spent on operations. The rest was stock issued for services and losses on conversion rather than cash.

~ the record ~

~ the faxes ~

On 16 May 2006 the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Roberts, under a litigation release headed SEC CHARGES FORMER VIDEO GAME CEO IN JUNK FAX SCAM. In November 2004 he had hired a stock promoter to fax tens of thousands of potential investors with baseless price targets, predicting the shares might climb as much as 3,000 percent, and falsely claiming the company was headed by a developer of the Xbox. He paid the promoter with four million shares of his own stock and sold roughly $422,500 of his personal holdings into the result, many of those sales unreported. He settled on 19 September 2008 without admitting or denying anything, taking a five-year bar from serving as an officer or director of a public company, a five-year penny-stock bar, and a $30,000 civil penalty.

The share count tells the same story without adjectives. There were 22,980,475 shares outstanding in March 2004, when the equity held by non-affiliates was valued at $67,458,181. By May 2006 that value was $8,578,501 across 541,789,024 shares. A year later there were 1,799,433,415 shares outstanding and an obligation to reserve a further 5.7 billion against convertible debentures. Staff went from 36 full-time people in March 2004 to three in May 2007.

~ the lapboard ~

One Phantom product reached customers. The Lapboard was a wireless keyboard that rotated over an integrated mousing surface so it could sit on your knees in front of a television, originally the console's input device and eventually the whole company. The pivot was announced in January 2006, the keyboard missed its own dates through October and November, an order from Alienware in November 2006 could not be filled, and it finally went on sale in June 2008 at $129. Maximum PC gave it 4 out of 10 and said the mouse was no good for gaming and the keyboard awful for typing. It was still being reviewed at $129.99 in July 2010.

In August 2008 the company sold the Phantom Game Service, the download platform that had been the entire original idea, for a base purchase price of $65,000. The SEC revoked the registration by default on 14 July 2009, in an administrative proceeding the company never answered, by which point it had moved to Port Chester, New York and its stock traded on the Pink Sheets under PHEI with fourteen market makers. The official blog kept going a while longer and stopped on 9 November 2011, with a post from the last chief executive linking to somebody's review of the keyboard.

~ nothing to envy ~

Writing about dead technology usually means writing about something other people had and I did not. This one inverts that neatly. It ran its whole course during my undergraduate years, and the gaming sites I was reading then had it filed as a punchline well before 2005. There was nothing here to be excluded from: no region ever got it and no shop ever stocked one.

The idea was broadly right, which is the part worth keeping. Valve had Steam running and patched into Half-Life while the Phantom was still a rendering, and got there by shipping the delivery software years before anyone asked it for hardware.

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