List of vaporware

This page is an incomplete list of known examples of vaporware, in alphabetical order by product name:
List of vaporware
Hardware
* RED Scarlet - 3K digital film-like modular movie camera under $3K, and recording 120 fps in the same quality as similarly sized DSLR's take still, with the original release date 2009. May NOW be released 2010, invoking Scarlet fever amongst indie movie makers. The initial promise "3K for $3K" was scrapped as new features were added and expenses rose. The minimum price for a usable product will NOW be $4750 for a camera with one, single, irremovable fixed lense (as in solid), a Red Volt battery with 40-60 min battery time, a Compact Flash port with 10-15 min recording time to a 16GB CF card, added with a few hours processing time of the Red Raw footage using a modern CPU. For better and more practical features - like interchangeable lenses, RED Brick with a few hours battery time, HDD/SSD storage and realtime processing of Red RAW footage with the Red Rocket PCI card - the initial cost of a Scarlet will at least be doubled, tripled or even quadrupled. Founder of Red Digital Cinema Camera Company is James Jannard, also founder of the sunglass company Oakley, Inc. Camera featured as 3rd in Wired.com's list "Vaporware 2009: Inhale the Fail" - http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/12/vaporware-2009-inhale-the-fail/ Question is if it will also be featured in Wired.com's 2010 list - if so, it will probably take 1st place. All the above may be subject to change after NAB 2010, April.
* Action Gamemaster - a handheld device designed by Active Enterprises
* Glaze3D - a graphics card designed by BitBoys Oy.
* L600 - a Linux-based game console/computer produced by Indrema
*Phantom - a console gaming system developed by Infinium Labs
*Elite 4 - a video game produced by Frontier Developments specifically by David Braben.
*The Fool and His Money - a puzzle game by Cliff Johnson originally announced in January 2003.
*Half-Life 2: Episode Three - Announced in May 2006 as due by Christmas 2007.
* Mario 128 - a video game in development by Nintendo, which apparently evolved into Pikmin. The project later evolved into Super Mario Galaxy.
* Metroid Dread - A Nintendo DS Game and speculated successor to Metroid Fusion, which was first "unveiled" by Game Informer in their list of First Party Nintendo Games to be seen at E3'05. Every single game and announcement on the list was seen in some form or shown to be true by Nintendo in the following days of E3'05, except for Metroid Dread, which was never, and still has yet to be spoken of by Nintendo. Most believed the game was cancelled, granted it was ever in development at all, and only speculation of its existence is the only evidence for it to not have been.
* Psyclapse - a hyped 8-bit "mega-game" which never made off paper.
* StarCraft: Ghost - a third-person shooter based on the StarCraft universe by Blizzard has been "postponed indefinitely" after five years of development.
* Tiberium, a tactical first-person shooter set in the Command and Conquer universe. When it was announced, EA Games revealed many details about the shooter, but then did not update anything about the title until its cancellation in September 2008. More recently, never-before-seen concept art of the game has emerged.
Software
* Pixel image editor, Pixel32, Pixel Studio Pro - www.kanzelsberger.com - A Photoshop alternative. Has been developed for 13 years with no final version ever released. It has been announced to have its final release in 2006, 2007 and 2009 but with no such release published. It is still being sold as beta software.
* Cairo Shell - www.cairoshell.com - An alternate shell for Windows. - Announced in 2002-2003; no tangible product, but reports of private alpha builds and lost code all the way to 2009. Cairo Shell is still "in development," for almost 8 years.
* Fresco - a replacement for the X Window System, formerly known as the Berlin Project.
* Ovation - An integrated software package for DOS that was announced by Ovation Technologies in 1983. Written about in many computer magazines at the time, Ovation was never released.
Standards and specifications
* Secure Digital Music Initiative
Other
* Vantive's Lawsuit in the late 90s
Surfaced vaporware
Products which once were considered to be Vaporware which eventually surfaced after a prolonged time:
* 3G
* Arc - A dialect of Lisp being developed by Paul Graham.
* Bluetooth
* Internet Explorer 7
* Microsoft Windows Vista (then, "Windows Code Name 'Longhorn'")
* Warcraft III
* Team Fortress 2. Beta builds of the final product have been distributed to numerous game review sites . On March 3, 2007, THQ announced that the game had gone gold and was released on March 20, 2007, though it was leaked three days earlier.
* Stonekeep began development in late-1990 with a projected development of nine months. The development continued to drag on until it was released in November 1995.
* Dark Sector - Announced on February 11, 2000 and shipped 8 years later. At first the game was a sci-fi MMO, then it became a stealth game and finally it turned into a third person shooter.
* Too Human - Shown in E3 in 1999 and released August 19, 2008.
* Project Xanadu - A hypertext content delivery system, postulated prior to the advent of the World Wide Web , source code was released in 1999 and eventually XanaduSpace 1.0 released in 2007
*Apple Inc. iSlate, a Tablet PC, rumoured since 2005 Apple announced the iPad in January 2010, to be released March 2010.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu