Dave Perry explains Gaikai's 'bizarre genesis'

Dave Perry's idea of a streaming game service has been a long time in the making, though the fruition of that idea, Gaikai, is less than a year into actual development. According to his latest piece for Develop, the idea for an online service with high-end game (and application) streaming has been germinating for some time in his head, starting with Airline Pilots -- an arcade flight simulator from Sega. "A friend of mine told me that we needed to buy that game, so we paid for it between us, and I stored the game in my garage," Perry explains. He found himself playing the game for hours, wondering if it would be possible to "play a real flight simulator" without having to shell out "thousands upon thousands" for it.

Years later, he found himself evangelizing his theories at Leipzig 2008, where he was approached by two gentlemen (Andrew Gault and Rui Pereira) working on the very technology he spoke about. From that partnership, Gaikai was born. Perry says what separates his company's product from OnLive's is that "it's a service" and as such there is no dictating where it can go -- OnLive is technology dependent. Though we've gotten a video tour of the service and plenty of talk from Mr. Perry about Gaikai so far, we've yet to get our hands on the service, and as such will remain (understandably) skeptical until we see more.