PF.magic

In 1994, Rob Fulop felt his world crashing down around him, three years after setting up PF Magic with John Scull, a former marketing executive of Apple. The company had been set up to work on an innovative communications device for the Sega Mega Drive called the Edge 16 – a 4800-baud modem which sat on top of the console to allow multiplayer gaming over telephone landlines. But the company funding it, AT&T, decided to pull the plug and PF Magic ended up sitting on the edge of oblivion.

“It wasn’t a good time and we were abandoned,” says Rob, still smarting at the decision. “AT&T had put $3 million into the Edge 16 and we’d developed the hardware and worked hard on the software, and yet they were cancelling the whole effort and writing it off. A lot of companies would have folded on the spot and AT&T was fine with that happening to us. We had to turn a corner and do something different but it was hard because our whole company had been devoted to this