Remember The Phantom

Thought bubble: Would it be stretching to call the vaporized Phantom console "ahead of its time"?

I just read that THQ will be offering its catalog on GameTap, Turner Broadcasting's videogame digital distribution service. That includes Titan Quest, whose "Gold" version I had not two weeks ago purchased off of Steam for $20. Steam, for anyone who's been living under a rock, is Half Life developer Valve's own digital distribution service. The differences between the two services include games offered and pricing model (GameTap is subscription-based and offers some older console games; Steam is pay-per-game and offers only PC titles), but the message is the same: "Welcome to the age of gaming where you don't need to leave the house to get product."

The age of digital distribution is a fascinating one in which we can get what we want on-demand just by lifting a finger or two. For a long while, though, some of us remained skeptical that we'd see a reliable conduit for delivering our beloved videogames. We countered the iTunes and HBO On Demand arguments with the simple issues of size and bandwidth. MP3s are a few megabytes a pop while games can fill nine-gigabyte DVDs. Movies are (a) streamed, and (b) delivered over the same dedicated line used by our cable provider, not via the internet; games have to process a motherlode of variables.

Yet with Steam and GameTap, we're seeing two robust, high-quality services that manage your downloads efficiently -- and don't require you to install a single game once you've downloaded it, because it'll install itself. With Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, Sony's Playstation Network, and Wii's Virtual Console and WiiWare services, this same "instantly-available, no fuss, no muss" mentality carries over to our living room home consoles. Now we're seeing glimpses of a future where we won't even need intense hardware to play games that stream in from a server and run out of browser windows, with Quake Live and Instant Action providing a hands-on look at what we can look forward to. People have already been able to play Lair on their PSPs -- albeit not perfectly -- from the comfort of their toilets, thanks to the Playstation 3's Remote Play functionality. Can you imagine former Sony executive Phil Harrison's statement about a disc-less Playstation 4 -- made as recently as last year but still sneered at (I plead guilty as well) -- coming true, not only with regards to discs, but maybe hardware as well? Could we see a future where we need not buy hardware on which to play our games, but merely a simple box that connects to a remote server which does all the processing for us?

I've thinking about all of this on and off again, and in a fit of crow-eating I always find myself tracing these marvels back to one oft-mocked, failed endeavor: the Phantom console from Infinium Labs, now named Phantom Entertainment. Perhaps you've heard of it (no, the first line of this editorial doesn't count). Way back in 2002, a brash man by the name of Tim Roberts founded Infinium and announced to the world that he'd spearhead the development and distribution of a console that couldn't accept discs -- nay, wouldn't need discs. Everything was available online and ready to download for a subscription fee. Oh, and hey, it wouldn't require you to manually install the software you downloaded. You'd be capturing the essence of consoles for a seamless PC gaming experience.

Of course back then, the entire thing was a laughingstock. Quite a few people, myself included, didn't believe that the plan was feasible. Like so many other shortsighted dissenters, my gripe was that I was unconvinced that someone would want to sit through the hours it took to download a gigabytes-large game (...uh, Titan Quest found its home on my hard drive in 120 minutes while I was asleep, and furthermore it installed itself...) when they could drive to the store and get the game in far less time (...erm, have you seen gas prices lately?...) and have a physical disc in hand that wasn't contingent on a hard drive staying healthy (...see, Steam offers backups you can burn to disc...).

Rewind for a second and look at those parenthetical statements. For all the derision that it received back then, the Phantom console's completely disc-less plan has actually come to fruition in some capacity, and it works incredibly well. It's just that it's not coming from Phantom. That's not to say that the Phantom should have been a guaranteed success. Not all of its detractors were necessarily worried about the digital-distribution-only scheme. For instance, some intrepid investigators came up with highly suspicious findings when trying to get a closer glimpse of the company. It was also easy to see that, from a hardware standpoint, it just wouldn't hold up to the demands of the constantly shifting PC gaming landscape. After all, with such meager specs being offered up-front, how often would you have to open up your Phantom to get it re-jiggered for the latest, hottest games? Could you even open the thing in the first place, considering the whole "console experience" idea?

Yet, regardless of its failures as a hardware device, the concept that drove it is alive and kicking. No, Tim Roberts and company shouldn't be praised for highly flawed execution and lack of foresight in other areas. To be sure, it's not as if Infinium Labs was the only company that saw a future in digital distribution, either. It is, however, interesting to note how the driving force behind a failure as massive as the Phantom has become as successful and popular as it is today. Perhaps with the backing of brighter minds and a more effective, well-timed plan, we'd be seeing Phantom consoles in living rooms today instead of the empty shell of a product we're left with.

No matter -- the Phantom's spirit (is that redundant or what?) unwittingly lives on in our broadband-connected Xbox 360s, Playstation 3s, Wiis and PCs. For all of the things this joke of a console had going against it, the Phantom got that one thing right, and there's probably a grumpy, unshaven entrepreneur named Tim Roberts sitting in a corner mumbling to himself, "I told you so."