Much like Atari, the upcoming streaming game service OnLive made a big deal about saying they were not going to be exhibiting at E3 2009. Well, they not only had some underground marketing outside the convention center this week they also had a full demo of their service at a downtown condo.

Our sister site Joystiq got an invite to check out the demo and based on the admittedly controlled demo conditions the service seemed to work well. They played a number of unnamed games while those games were being streamed from a server 350 miles away and with the exception of the FPS game (which they said was slightly sluggish) everything else delivered on OnLive's promise. Of course, playing games in controlled demo conditons is different than doing the same in the privacy of your own home. We hope that OnLive will keep its promise and go into open beta this summer so we can see for ourselves.