With Nintendo dominating the handheld business, many companies has tried to topple the giant, and many fail because their hardware just outright sucks. By 2005, Sony tried to compete against Nintendo with the PSP, and while the DS is so far ahead of the PSP that it's impossible to catch up, the PSP has found a much bigger audience then all other handhelds before it. In fact it has a bigger audience then all other non-Nintendo handhelds put together. Also in that same year, another handheld called the Gizmondo was released, but unlike Sony's PSP it found the lowest audience ever, selling less than 25,000 units. That's not just pathetic. It's UNGODLY pathetic. N-Gage, one of the most mocked systems of all time, sold about 3 million. Even Game.Com sold about 300,000! How did Gizmondo do so poorly? Simply put, because it was never made to be a real handheld. The poor thing was born as a front for a business who tricked companies into giving them money to waste on themselves like they were Enron. Eventually the company went out of business, and one of it's founders was sentenced to jail for embezzling funds, but not before cutting his Ferrari Enzo in half in a horrific car crash and having ties to a Swedish Mafia.
This is the Shameful Story of the Gizmondo.
Tiger Telematics
It all began in 2002 when a Florida carpet retailer called Floor Décor merged with a Swedish electronics company called Eagle Eye Scandinavian to form UK based Tiger Telematics. Eagle Eye was formed by Carl Freer, and for this new company he brought on Bo Stefan Eriksson as his executive offer. The company focused on electronics, and announced in 2004 that they would be designing a new handheld gaming system called the Gizmondo.
Before the Gizmondo was even finished, the company was becoming infamous for spending an extravagant amount of money, mostly because the higher-ups loved to steal money and waste it on themselves. For example, Freer's wife was paid $150,000 a year for "Public Relations Services", while Free and Eriksson gave themselves $1,500,000 salaries and hundred thousand dollar car allowances. They even bought their own shop for the Gizmondo on Regent Street in London. They also invested money into other companies that just so happened to have been owned by Freer and Eriksson. Despite this kind of spending, Tiger was able to get plenty of money from it's investors and stockholders.
The Gizmondo itself
Augmented Reality: A concept that could've been worth something.
So what exactly was this Gizmondo?
The Gizmondo was basically an all-in-one sort of handheld like the PSP was. It was not only going to play games, but it would double as a GPS device, a digital camera, text messenger, and it can play movies and music. The pricing on the handheld was awful, selling for $400 at launch. One of the biggest criticisms about the PSP was it's launch price of $250, so imagine a handheld trying to succeed by selling at the same price the Xbox 360 was initially launched with. There was a cheaper version you can buy for $230, but the problem with that was you were forced to watch advertisements (called "Smart Ads") on it. Imagine if a company sold you a Season DVD set for a TV show at $100 and a cheaper version for $40, but the $40 one has commercials you couldn't skip. Odds are you're not going to buy either version, because one is too expensive and the other is absurd.
Despite the iffy pricing, there was one amazing feature about the Gizmondo that, if it was a success, could've changed the way handheld games were played. Gizmondo planned to have a game feature using the camera called "Augmented Reality." What AR would do is create digital images based on special placemats used. Moving the placemat around would move the digital image in real life.
Gizmondo didn't show any specific game that would take real advantage of this feature, but surely there had to be a game that would eventually do so right?
Unfortunately, the thought of that game coming became an Augmented Reality of it's own, because the Gizmondo wasn't going to last very long.
Gizmondo: 10/22/2005 – 2/2/2006
Gizmondo: Available...somewhere.
In March 2005, in typical money-wasting fashion, the Gizmondo had a big launch party in Europe featuring such celebrities as Verne Troyer, Tom Green, and Sting. Three months after the handheld was released, less then 5,000 units were sold. Unless the Gizmondo suddenly got a must-have game, this thing was pretty much dead already. James Beaven, Gizmondo's head of corporate communications, said the handheld needed more development time and better consumer testing. Apparently the only consumer testing the handheld out was being tried out by a couple of kids. After several delays the handheld finally made it to America on October 22nd, 2005. By this time the DS and PSP were already out for several months, so trying to capture an audience was going to be hard, especially if, according to James Beaven, you have absolutely no marketing whatsoever.
So let's say you actually decide to buy a Gizmondo, because who knows, it just might actually be better then both the DS and the PSP combined, even though both of those handhelds combined would still cost less then the Gizmondo. Where do you go to buy this handheld? Surely GameStop would have it and would be trying to sell it with one of those trade-in ripoffs right? No? Okay then, what about lesser stores like Game Crazy? Not there either? Okay, well since it's one of those multi-functional devices, maybe it'd be easier to find it at electronic stores like Best Buy or Circuit City. They don't carry the thing either? What about Wal-Mart, the store that carries just about anything? Nowhere to be found.
You know where the Gizmondo was sold? In MALL KIOSKS.
Yeah, those booths you pass by in a mall outside the stores? Aside from Gizmondo's website, those were the only places you can actually buy one. Honestly, have you ever bought something really expensive from a kiosk? Unless you knew from the start was a Gizmondo was, and odds are you didn't, you'd walk right pass this kiosk without a second glance. That is, if you were actually able to find one of these kiosks. There are approximately 50,000 malls in the United States. Out of that many, only 12 of them actually had a Gizmondo kiosk.
To the surprise of no one, trying to sell a device in a handful of kiosks and not marketing the system at all led to very poor sales, and in just a few months Tiger Telemetics went out of business, and thus the Gizmondo was officially dead. Only 8 of the 14 planned games were released, and not one of them were any good.
Then things get weird
Eriksson's Ferrari Enzo. Well, at least the front half of it.
As if the Gizmondo didn't have problems of it's own, Carl Freer and Stefan Eriksson left the company shortly after the release of Gizmondo in America. The reasons being that before creating the company, Freer was accused of selling stolen luxury cars and Eriksson was accused of having ties with the "Uppsalamaffian," a Swedish Mafia. By this point Tiger Telematics had lost $300 million in the past twelve months, and with these two criminal records coming to light, many people saw the Gizmondo as being nothing more then a front for cheat investors out of their money.
On February 21st, 2006, just three weeks after Tiger Telematics officially went out of business, Stefan Eriksson would be involved in a horrific car crash in Malibu, California. Going at 162 MPH, Eriksson's Ferrari Enzo spun out of control and got cut in half right through a light pole. Amazingly, Eriksson comes out uninjured in the crash. When police arrive at the scene, Eriksson's blood alcohol level is found to be at .09, making him legally drunk. Eriksson claims he wasn't driving the vehicle, saying a man he called "Dietrich" was driving and that he had escaped into the nearby woods. "Dietrich" is never actually found by police. Eriksson also claimed at the scene that he was part of an anti-terrorism group.
On April 8th, 2006, Eriksson would be arrested from his Bel-Air home for drunk-driving, illegal firearm pocession, and embezzling funds. Not from the Gizmondo, but rather for all the cars he never actually owned (he either leased them from Europe or got them as stolen), never made any payments, and crashed three of them. By November, Eriksson would be sentenced to three years in prison, remarkable considering he would've gotten 14 years if found guilty. Unfortunately, he was released by January 2008, though he was deported from the US.
Meanwhile, his buddy Freer was arrested on April 26th, 2006 for illegally buying firearms, one of which was through impersonating a police officer. Freer claimed this was for Eriksson's anti-terrorism group which turned out to be the San Gabriel Valley Transit Authority, a bus service for the elderly. Despite being a bus service, police arrested the founder and seized several badges, guns, and an unmarked police car.
Anyways, let's back to the Gizmondo before I forget that this is a video game column.
A hopeless return
By 2007, the Gizmondo was long gone and was forgotten by a majority of gamers. The poor thing. All it wanted to be was a normal handheld gaming system just like everyone else. But the only ones actually treating it like a true handheld device were it's dedicated hackers and modders, such as the people at Gizmondo Forums who've made better use of the handheld then the company that created it.
But just when the story of Gizmondo should've been officially brought to a close, Carl Freer started up a new company called Media Power, and intends to bring back the Gizmondo, bigger and better then ever, with a price of only $99. But really, who's going to take the word of one of the men who was involved in completely screwing up the Gizmondo in the first place? If anything, Carl Freer should never go into any sort of electronics expenditure. So unless the people at Gizmondo Forums and other homebrew sites are the ones creating applications and games for the Gizmondo 2, it's going to fail horribly. Freer also said that this unit was going to be made available by mid-October. So if he's really serious about the new form of the Gizmondo, you should expect to hear news about it any day now.
Me? I'll wait to hear about how it was a scam all over again.
