Ars reader: So a guy walks into my shop with an Infinium Phantom console…

Late last week, apparent pictures of a rare Sony/Nintendo "Play Station" SNES CD-ROM prototype surfaced on the Internet, proving that even an unreleased vaporware console can still exist in some physical form. Inspired by that revelation, an Ars reader has come forward with pictures of another physical relic of gaming's vaporware past—a functional prototype of Infinium's infamous Phantom console.

If you didn't follow gaming closely in the early 2000s, you might not know (or remember) the long, sad saga of the Infinium Phantom. First announced in 2002, the Phantom was a "revolutionary" effort to bring the modularity and power of a PC to the living room TV. Infinium promised the Phantom would be able to stream games over a broadband connection, a plan that companies like OnLive would find more or less unworkable even a decade later.

The Phantom's name turned out to be prescient. Though the company dragged out its vaporware promises through a few years of defamation lawsuits and trade show presentations, the console never came to market. By 2006, Infinium had suffered $73 million in losses and its CEO was facing SEC charges for a pump-and-dump stock scheme. Infinium did eventually release one product, a keyboard/mouse lapboard meant for living room PC gamers. It got savaged by reviewers and failed to make a big market impact.

Since then, the Phantom has mainly been remembered through industry in-jokes and "Whatever happened to..." style lists. But this morning, Ars reader Eddie Schlesinger approached us with the above collection of photos.

As Schlesinger tells it, a console collector brought the Phantom prototype in to Microtek Systems—his computer repair shop in Venice, Florida—nearly three years ago (the recent Nintendo Play Station photos reminded Schlesinger of the incident, he said). That collector had "picked it up somewhere for $200 from someone he did some work for... because the previous owner didn’t know what this Phantom thingie was," as Schlesinger recalls. "He knew exactly what he had, and I immediately recognized the unit, mostly because of the stories that Ars did on the scam."

The case the collector brought in was a bare bones mess of components that didn't quite add up to a working computer, Schlesinger said. That includes a Socket A motherboard ("I think it was one of Asus' mATX mobos"), Nvidia FX5700 AGP video card, some DDR RAM, and a bunch of ports in the back ("some functioning, and some dummy"): cable modem and 10/100 LAN ports; composite, component, and S-Video outputs; optical, coax, and RCA audio outputs; and four USB ports. Schlesinger says he installed a hard drive with Windows XP, soldered on some real audio jacks, and set it all up to load the below Phantom promo video on startup (taken from trade show demos). The original owner took the unit back after that, eager to show his friends a "working" Phantom prototype.

We should point out here that we haven't been able to independently confirm Schlesinger's information; efforts to track down the owner who brought in the unit in the first place have so far been unsuccessful. That said, the photos and story certainly fit everything we know about the Phantom. That includes the general specs and the console's shell design as seen in numerous trade shows and promotional renders, plus the location of ports on the back (Infinium also showed a smaller, sleeker Phantom design at later conferences).

It's not hard to imagine one of those trade show prototypes being spirited out of the dying Infinium years ago and eventually making its way to an eagle-eyed collector (who apparently got a steal on such a rarity). If this is a fake, it's a very elaborate and detailed one, with no real hope of monetary reward from the person bringing it to light (Schlesinger doesn't even have the unit on hand anymore). It would also be a fake that's been in the planning for a while, as Schlesinger posted these photos of the unit to Facebook back in September 2012, where they sat largely unnoticed and unremarked upon for years.

Some quick Internet sleuthing doesn't turn up any information or photos of any similar Phantom prototypes after the fall of Infinium; these design mockups of the console's shell that popped up in 2010 might be the closest thing. We reached out to a couple of avid game collectors who are constantly looking for rarities like this, and neither of them had ever seen a Phantom prototype out in the wild. The collector that brought this machine in to Schlesinger may have a one-of-a-kind item on his hands.

Schlesinger himself recalls not being that impressed by what he saw of the Phantom prototype. "Being that this was such a dinky machine, there's no way that this 'system' was going to be much of anything remotely resembling a gaming system," he told Ars. "At minimum, it would require a total rebuild every couple of years or so.....mobo, graphic card, memory. Socket A can only get you so far, you know."

But perhaps Infinium was just way ahead of its time. The idea of bringing PC gaming to the living room has since been taken up by Valve, which is making a big push for its first wave of Linux-powered Steam Machine hardware later this year. If those efforts find any success, Valve should give at least a small shoutout to Infinium and the Phantom prototype that showed them and others how not to craft PC gaming for a console audience.

Listing image by Eddie Schlesinger