Quote:Pre-E3 2004: The Phantom Materializes
Not just a PC console, but a gaming service.
May 10, 2004 - In the gaming industry, controversy seems to revolve around two basic things: violent content and hardware performance shenanigans. Infinium Labs garnered conflict and gossip in a third area, with an overall platform. This had to do a lot with the fact that no one knew much about the system or its service, and Infinium Labs was rather slow to reveal details. What were the specs? What games was it going to have? How much was it going to cost? When did they plan to launch it? Believe it or not, Kevin Bachus answered almost all of these questions for IGN recently, in a presentation that definitely raised some eyebrows.

First of all, let's talk about Infinium Labs' high-level aims--why they've decided to do this in the first place, and what niche they're aiming to fill. One of the advantages they leverage is sheer convenience. You don't have to go to a store to buy the game, or even order it over the Internet and wait for it to ship to you. Simply buy it via the Phantom's Internet-enabled interface, and the game starts streaming to its 40GB hard drive. Developers don't have to customize the game for streamability like Bachus says they do for Steam--it's treated more like a video file and the transfer scheme works across all games without any tweaking. Games also automatically patch themselves, so the customer doesn't have to keep abreast of all the hairy details of getting a game to work nicely. And because the Phantom has the same hardware in every machine, there are fewer headaches in getting a game to run on the platform.

Infinium intends to allow publishers to bypass the "retail bottleneck," where they have to pay for prominent shelf space and deal with inventory and distribution. The retailers, however, are also onboard because they get an unspecified cut of the profits. Lastly, Bachus believes that the apparently relatively light Christmas season will make the Phantom's November debut a good choice.




But how does the Phantom compare to a PC? Well, It's going to have an Athlon XP 2500+ CPU, 256MB RAM, 128MB GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, the aforementioned 40GB hard drive, nForce 2 Ultra 400 motherboard, a custom controller and game pad, a keyboard and mouse, and a lapboard, all included in the package. Bachus said there also may be adapters in the future that will allow you to connect standard PC input devices into the Phantom's proprietary connectors.

Also, the Phantom is fully LAN enabled and transparent to the network, so if you have UT 2004 installed on it, you can play with your buddies who are on their "real" computers and connect to UT's master game server like everybody else. The Phantom also supports HDTV, Dolby Digital Surround Sound, and runs on Windows XP Embedded. But there is no optical drive, floppy drive, or memory card connector (that we could see). It looks like everything that you install must go through its Ethernet connection, which will connect to the Internet via a standard ISP.

Although launch content and launch partners will not be announced until August, quickly followed by volume manufacturing, Bachus told us we should expect "in the low to mid 100s" of games to be available when it goes live. He does say, however, that "not many" partners have signed on as of yet, although "not many" depends on what your actual goal is, I suppose.

But I've been saving a zinger for ya: The system is free. Of course, there are caveats. There is a monthly fee of $29.95 that includes a basic library of included games, and you have to subscribe for two years. Triple-A games are planned to be available at reduced cost, around $5-10 less than retail. Plus you will, finally, be able to rent PC games, with the planned system of $5 dollars for three days, with the possibility of rent-to-own also in the works. With Andrew "Bunny" Huang on their advisory board (the person who originally cracked the Xbox), they seem pretty confident that the Phantom will not be easily crackable. Hopefully, it will be more trouble than it's worth, because I for one have been longing for the ability to rent a PC game, instead of plunking down $40-50 at once.

So with the Phantom entering beta testing in June or July, a data and call center going live in June, and all the other staggered milestones revealed between now and November, it looks like Infinium Labs is truly serious about entering the gaming market. Only time will tell, and it looks like we'll have to wait until August before we know if it has any teeth.
-- Tom McNamara