I read today over on Engadget that InstantAction announced their new technology for streaming games to any web browser and I feel sickened.

For me, this is the third time in my life that I have created a technology, showed it to companies and people,and had them be disinterested in it. It really is disheartening at times.

The first time was in 1990, developing technology for the creation of fruit machines for the European market, reducing the development time from over three months (and that was fast) to less than two weeks, with less testing and Q/A. Nobody was interested. I showed it to a number of companies. Not a single nibble.

The second time was back in 1994/1995 when demonstrating a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, the original was coded in C, which was later re-written in Java, which at that time was utterly brand new and still in Beta, because I wanted the system to be instantly cross-platform. I remember standing in a nightclub in Hollywood around 1995, drunk off my arse, explaining the technology to the lead guitarist of Aerosmith. That technology formed the basis of what later became many of the peer-to-peer technologies today.

In the middle of 2007 I demonstrated a game streaming technology, oddly enough called “GameStream” that I had created, to Activision, that streamed the game, at that time Shrek the Third, to your local machine. It broke the game up in to chunks, analysing the file access pattern of the game to get the pieces used first to you as quickly as possible. The software ran in any web browser that had Java installed, which is about 95% of every web browser out there. In 2008 I stood in the THQ offices and the Take-Two Offices and demonstrated Crysis streamned over my 3G cellphone in real-time. Click the link in the browser, and within 3 minutes, the Crysis game starts up. Instant dismissal of the technology and the concept of streaming games to player’s computers in real-time.

In 2008 I also showed the technology to a major MMORPG publisher (mentioning no names *cough* rhymes with Wizard *cough*) and I got the impression I was speaking an alien language. “Why would we want to stream the game to them when we can just have them buy a retail box?” was the response from the Executive Producer.

I even talked to my company attorney about patenting this technology, but because we felt it was so obvious, and because nobody showed the slightest bit of interest, we let it fall by the wayside, moving on to other projects to work on.

So frustrating.

If any company out there feels like taking a look at this technology, feel free to drop me a line. I’ve still got the technology demo, which works on 95% of all web browsers on all desktops, still on my laptop. Crysis streamed over a cellphone, to your local machine? Fucking brilliant idea!

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