SOURCE: Wired

Wired magazine has a great story up right now on the improbable rise and fall of Gizmondo.

The company made a handheld game device -- also called Gizmondo -- that was designed to compete with the PSP and DS.

The little handheld had all sorts of interesting technology under the hood, but cost too much and suffered from a weak game lineup. What's really interesting, though, is that the company was almost a complete sham, run by Swedish thugs more concerned with lining their pockets than making games. The whole thing unraveled when one of the company's executives crashed his $1 million Enzo Ferrari in California earlier this year, and police started plucking at the various loose threads in his story. Wired does a superb job of collecting all the threads and weaving them into an absolutely fascinating tale.

What I find the most odd, though, was that Gizmondo was not a total fraud. In 2005, I had a chance to test out the Gizmondo device at E3, and it really was kind of cool. In the game Agaju: The Sacred Path, rotating the console would cause your in-game camera to rotate, as well.

Apparently, while most of the guys running the company were crooks, they did put some money into research and development. Just an all around oddball situation.