Gizmondo

Remember Gizmondo? Not Gizmodo, the tech site, but Gizmondo, the hand-held game device that was supposed to compete with the Nintendo DS and PSP? Neither do I. It was a huge flop and the company went bankrupt. But I came across this Wired article about a year ago, and I never get tired of reading it. The story behind Gizmondo is simply amazing. Here is the first paragraph to catch your interest:

THE BUMP IN THE ROAD that ended Bo Stefan Eriksson's fantastic ride is practically invisible. From 10 feet away, all you can see is the ragged edge of a tar-seamed crack in an otherwise smooth sheet of pavement. Only the location is impressive - a sweet stretch of straightaway on California's Pacific Coast Highway near El Pescador state beach, just past the eucalyptus-shaded mansions of the Malibu hills. On that patch of broken asphalt, there's barely enough lip to stub a toe. Of course, when you hit it at close to 200 miles per hour, as police say Eriksson did in the predawn light last February 21, while behind the wheel of a 660-horsepower Ferrari Enzo, consequences magnify.

This other article has more details about the history and especially the financial data of the company. After reading these two articles, I come to the same conclusion as one of the commenters on this article: "The whole thing was a front for the Swedish mafia to launder money."

And it looks like this story might not be over. From Wikipedia:

In November 2007 Carl Freer stated in an interview for the Swedish-American journalist Hans Sandberg that he was interested in starting up production of the Gizmondo again. The interview was published in the business news site Realtid.se, and a translated segment of the interview was made available on the author's blog The Nordic Link on January 23, 2008. The week before, Veckans Affärer, another Swedish business publication, had confirmed Realtid's story about Carl Freer's cooperation with the British company Plextek, who designed the original platform.