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8. Action GameMaster

Active Enterprises was a gaming company that valued quantity over quality, releasing cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Sega Genesis jammed with 52 games, each of dubious quality. The Action GameMaster, which Active announced in 1994, was no deviation from the philosophy. The portable game system would not only play its own cartridges but would also handle NES, Super NES, and Sega Genesis games (with the help of adapters), as well as CD-ROM games, via another adapter. Contributing to the kitchen-sink approach were a TV tuner add-on and car and AC adapters. (Even with all that functionality, Active claimed that the GameMaster would have "light weight portability.")

Despite a wildly enthusiastic press kit distributed at 1994's Consumer Electronics Show, the Action GameMaster failed to materialize. Small wonder, considering it would never have been able to license the required hardware from Nintendo or Sega. And even its own concept design revealed that Active's concept of "portable" was clearly different from the rest of the gaming world's: If the company's claim of a 3.2-inch LCD could be taken at its word, the design suggested that the Action GameMaster would be at least 10 inches wide and 8 inches long. The company, which was likely banking on a flood of orders that never came, disappeared soon after.

7. Infinium Phantom

Sometimes a product name is just too perfect. Almost from the moment that Infinium Labs' January 2003 press release announced the Phantom, a console that would "outperform the Xbox, Sony PlayStation 2, and GameCube," it encountered skepticism.

The release was chock-full of tech marketing jargon yet remained entirely free of details about the Phantom itself--while promising a March unveiling and a November launch.

Details did emerge soon after: The Phantom was slated to be, in essence, a PC running the embedded version of Windows XP, which would allow gamers to play PC games--but the primary hook was Phantom's on-demand system, where subscribers could download any game they wanted over an Internet connection. At one stage, the company even planned to give the console away free to anyone who subscribed to a two-year service.

Bloggers and forum posters had a field day with the Phantom, deriding the lack of a physical product or any reliable information on Infinium.

Imagine everyone's surprise when a Phantom unit was actually shown at 2004's E3 trade show, complete with the wireless LapBoard (a keyboard and mouse that fit on a tilting tray), and a new launch date--which, of course, came and went with no Phantom.

A revamped Phantom was on display at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show, but a string of missed and reset release dates eroded any goodwill that its public appearances may have generated. Later in the year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gave notice that it would bring charges against former Infinium CEO Timothy Roberts. The SEC filing several months later revealed that Infinium had lost over $62.7 million in three years, with only $3.5 million going to actual development. A few months after that, Infinium officially ended the Phantom project, changed its name to Phantom Entertainment, and focused its efforts on the LapBoard--which, despite an order from Alienware, has yet to materialize.

6. Apple Interactive Television Box

These days we watch movies on game consoles, browse Web sites on our mobile phones, and listen to music on, well, just about anything. But for the longest time so-called convergence was always just out of reach, and the Holy Grail of the convergence craze was interactive television, where couch potatoes could, say, visit a company's Web site when it was displayed during a commercial, or vote on the outcome of a TV show while watching it. (No, American Idol hadn't been launched yet.)

In 1993, Apple partnered with British Telecom (now BT) and Belgacom to produce a set-top box to go along with their interactive television services. The Apple Interactive Television Box was a modified 25-MHz Macintosh LC-475, and, rather modestly, allowed users to download and watch content (and fast-forward or rewind, similar to today's TiVo-style recorders). Future plans included interactive game shows and educational content for children, as well as add-on hardware such as a mouse, a keyboard, and a CD-ROM drive.

In 1994, selected households in Britain and Belgium placed the black set-top box sporting an Apple logo on top of their TVs, and trials began a year later in the United States. Apple quickly learned that consumers simply weren't interested in interactive television.

The trials ended, and the Interactive Television Box was shelved. Fast-forward to 2008 (skipping 1996's Internet-enabled but failed Apple Pippin @World gaming console), and the company's sleek Apple TV media streamer lets you rent HD and standard-definition iTunes Store videos directly from your TV.