Take a deep breath and savor the sweet stench of disappointment. It’s time for another installment of Wired.com’s Vaporware Awards.
This is the 12th year we’ve offered our annual roundup of the tech industry’s biggest, brashest and most baffling unfulfilled promises. As in years past, we turned to you, our readers, to offer suggestions on what we should include. A few weeks ago, we posted the rules: No rumors, it had to have been promised for this year, and anything that ended up delayed, derailed or otherwise absent was fair game. You e-mailed, you commented, you tweeted.
There’s one particular gaping hole this year. We decided to give a pass to our long-reigning champ, Duke Nukem Forever. We know, it just isn’t the same without Sir Duke, but it wouldn’t have been fair to include him, either. Game company 3-D Realms imploded this summer, and we’re waiting for an official announcement from rights-holder Take-Two Interactive, before we declare this fish flesh or flush. You can read the whole story now in the January issue of Wired magazine.
Two other big jobs got plenty of votes but weren’t included. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner was popular, but the big bird actually flew, and the ship date has been 2010 for some time. We’re relying on those pesky union workers to earn it a slot on next year’s list.
Same with the Large Hadron Collider. The thing (eventually) turned on and did what it was supposed to do this year without exploding or causing total particle inversion on a universal scale. So, no Vaporware Award.
The following 10, however, were not so lucky. Prepare to taste the waste.
10. Spotify in the U.S.
The streaming-music service with the vast library, instant-play technology and the slick user experience launched in Britain in February 2009. Listeners went crazy for it, and Spotify now has millions of users across Europe.
The service was supposed to arrive stateside late this year, complete with streaming apps for the iPhone and for Android.But so far, there’s only been deafening silence.
Record labels still force partners into separate distribution deals for North America and the rest of the world, so Spotify has had to start over, signing a whole new set of contracts before opening up shop across the pond. Complicating things is the fact that the cost of licensing on-demand music for the United States is excessive and unfriendly to Spotify’s cheap-subscription model.
Meanwhile, savvy U.S. listeners are routing their streams through European proxy servers — or just going to LaLa or MOG — to get their fix.
Screenshot: Spotify’s iPhone app
9. Pixel Qi’s display
Hardware start-up Pixel Qi has been promising a low-power, color, multimode display all year. The company was founded by Mary Lou Jepsen, the brain behind the OLPC XO’s innovative display, so you know they’re good for it.
The Pixel Qi website still says its displays will be available in “high-volume mass production” by late 2009. And yet, you can’t get one. No one we know of has seen one. According to Jepsen’s most recent blog post, they’re now on schedule for Q1 2010.
If the claims the company has been making during development bear out, this hot new display tech could upend the netbook and e-book markets. But for now, it’s still vapor.
Photo: Pixel Qi’s Screen/Mary Lou Jepsen
8. Mitsubishi 73-inch LaserVue HDTV
Gadget lust hit new heights among the home entertainment crowd when Mistubishi first debuted its LaserVue line of 3-D-ready, laser-powered, cinema-sized powerhouses. These rear-projections TVs have twice the color range of an LCD HDTV with lower power consumption. And freakin’ lasers.
But sales of the “small” 65-inch model, priced at $7,000, were disappointing, and production of the planned 73-inch model was halted, so Mistubishi could reassess the market for giant, expensive televisions in the midst of a shrinking economy.
Image: Mitsubishi
7. Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 3
Episodes 1 and 2 of this farcical role-playing game both came out in 2008 on multiple consoles and platforms. The games won all sorts of awards and accolades from top publications, and earned raves from our own Game|Life blog.
The Penny Arcade games are short and episodic — play is limited to about five or six hours per adventure — so the only way to keep up the momentum is to release follow-up installments quickly. Episodes 3 and 4 were set to arrive in 2009, but neither has shown up. Penny Arcade and the developers at Hothead Games have remained tight-lipped about the delays. We’d be happy just to see the third installment at this point.
Image: Penny Arcade/Hothead Games
6. D-Link Xtreme N450
This super-charged wireless N router from D-Link promises throughput of 450 Mbps — that’s waay faster than any other N routers on the market, the fastest of which top out at about 300 Mbps. The device has three antennas and all the extra bells and whistles (glamour features on a router — wooo), but the crazy ridiculous throughput is the big selling point for the N450. The press release from CES 2009 (back in January) is still posted on D-Link’s website, but the product never materialized.
Details about how the N450 achieves such blazing speed are sketchy, so we’re expecting to see the proof once we get to taste the pudding. Of course, the pudding has yet to hit the table.
Image: D-Link
5. TextMate 2
The award-winning Textmate code editor from MacroMates software is many a Mac programmer’s dream tool. It has powerful macros and auto-completing snippets for all the major programming languages and frameworks, and yet, it’s simple to use and remarkably easy on the eyes.
Books have been written about it. Some companies have their entire development teams running it.
But it’s also been stuck in 1.x limbo for years. Lead developer Allan Odgaard got so tired of answering the barrage of questions about TextMate 2’s release — including from those wondering if it would ever arrive — that he broke months of silence by posting a long sob story on his blog titled, “Working on It.”
He claimed version 2 is operational, but that it is “lacking the spit and polish of a finished app.” He also refused to give a release date.
The fall 2009 release of Snow Leopard brought more compatibility setbacks. It is perhaps no coincidence that Odgaard’s chosen tagline for his app is “The missing editor for OS X.”
Image: MacroMates
4. Black Mesa
Black Mesa is a bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of a game. Part remake of the original Half-Life from 1998, and part third-party mod of Half-Life 2, Black Mesa is a complete ground-up rewrite of the first-person shooter using all new 3-D models, textures and scripts. It’s being developed on top of the Source game engine.
Unlike Frankenstein’s piecemeal creation, however, Black Mesa is still dead on the assembly table after almost six years of work. At the end of 2008, the development team posted a trailer featuring highlights from the game (shown above), and announced a vague 2009 release date. However, it was announced on the Black Mesa community forum in early December 2009 that the team would not be able to release the game in 2009. It’s been pushed back to an early-2010 release.
“We placed a 2009 deadline on ourselves to motivate us and bring this six-year project to a close,” writes project leader Carlos Montero. “And while we didn’t quite make it, we have come very close, and you can expect a complete, polished game to hit your hard drives in the near future. We’ll be sure and update if anything changes. Until then, hang tight, it’s coming!”
3. Red Scarlet Camera
Red Digital Cinema began causing waves among aspiring filmmaker types in 2007 when it introduced the Red One, the first digital cinema camera judged by the Hollywood elite to be truly worthy of the big screen. It was a huge leap forward in both the quality and design of digital movie cameras, and now everyone’s waiting to see what the company will do next.
They’re going to have to keep waiting.
Red’s most anticipated new camera is the Red Scarlet, the $3,000 little brother to the all-pro $17,500 Red One. The Scarlet marks Red’s first take on a high-end camcorder, and its specs blow away most other cameras in its price range.
It was promised in 2009 when it debuted at the 2008 NAB conference, but after numerous delays, the Red Scarlet is as elusive as the Scarlet Pimpernel. It is now expected to arrive in May or June 2010.
Shocker: Red’s corporate mantra is “Everything subject to change. Count on it.”
Reader dustypants writes, “I have been waiting for this since last year, only to have it escalate in price three times and still not be released. Lovable bastards.”
Image: Red Digital Cinema
2. The CrunchPad
Big-daddy news blog TechCrunch has never shied away from pointing out the big mistakes being made by the various hopefuls trying to crack the tablet-PC market. Site editor Michael Arrington had been seeing countless demos of these combination web-surfing, book-reading and video-playing devices, and he had judged most of them to be sub-standard. So, Arrington hooked up with hardware-partner Fusion Garage and set out on a mission to create a better tablet — nay, the best tablet — for consumers.
The CrunchPad was envisioned, designed, priced at around $200 and slated for delivery by the end of 2009.
However, Fusion Garage had different ideas. The Singapore-based start up decided to bring the slim touchscreen device to market by itself without TechCrunch’s involvement. Both parties have made different claims about what the terms of the original agreement were, as well as who owns the intellectual property contained within the Linux-powered tablet. Fusion Garage and TechCrunch are now involved in litigation, and the launch schedule is out the window.
The tablet has been renamed the JooJoo, the price tag is now $500, and it’s not arriving until next year.
Our readers, it seems, just want to get their hands on the thing.
“I don’t care if it was he said/she said,” says Wayne Hartman. “Real artists ship!”
“La tablette CrunchPad est morte,” says Merkapt. “Vive le JooJoo.”
Photo: Wired.com
1. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Another year, another “almost done” video game taking top prize.
This time, it goes to StarCraft II , Blizzard’s long-anticipated sequel to the real-time strategy blockbuster StarCraft: Brood War. The game picks up the story where the first game left off, continuing the battle between the Protoss, Terran and Zerg. But the alien super-races must have signed some sort of armistice, because 12 years have lapsed since StarCraft ‘s release, and there’s still no StarCraft II.
We were supposed to see a StarCraft II beta during 2009, but it’s been pushed back to first half of 2010. And the latest official announcements from Blizzard have pegged the game for a final-code release later in 2010. The company says the upcoming launch of its Battle.net online gaming service is to blame.
So, we realize we’re bending our own rules a little to include StarCraft II on this year’s list. But we reserve every right to do so based on several factors.
First, a playable version of StarCraft II debuted over two years ago at BlizzCon 2007. There’s been no action since then, just an agonizingly long wait. Furthermore, we’ve seen first-hand reports, videos, demos and written reviews of the game all along, and the whole experience has been built up into an epic tease.
Finally, the public is downright irate. We received more votes for StarCraft II from Wired.com readers than every other item on this list combined. Here’s a sample of some of your comments:
“I don’t care what Blizzard says. It will never, ever be released.” –FireyFate
“The waiting sucks. It has been what, 12 years, since Brood War came out? Come on, Blizzard.” –Aaron James Tangoan
“I’ve gone from ‘I need this’ to ‘I could not care less.'” –Luis Frost
“Perhaps it’s taking them extra time to figure out how to take the LAN networking code out.” –Andrew Lett
“ StarCraft: Brood War = Best RTS ever. StarCraft II = Best RTS never.” –Bill Cameron
“I remembering pre-ordering it for my brother’s birthday back in August of 2008 when Circuit City was still in business.” –whoisdarr
“So without Duke Nukem Forever, how am I supposed to get my name in the Vaporware survey? Guess I bet on the wrong horse. Should’ve picked StarCraft II.” –Dennis Murphy
Image: Blizzard Software
The whole of Wired.com’s editorial staff contributed to this article, but a special thank you goes to Senior Editor Dylan Tweney for his help.
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