The Alienware Story

world of alien Ware. This is a company that's been making specialized gaming rig computers since the mid nineteen nineties, and I thought it might be cool to see where it got its start and where is it going now.

A little bit later in this episode, I'll be talking with Frank Azor, general manager of alien Ware, one of the co founders when the early early employees of the company, and he's going to give us some background on that company, a little bit more about the philosophy and the design uh decisions, and and just kind of what makes the company tick. But let's stay set the stage a little bit so that we understand why alien Wear even has

a space in the PC world. Well, games have been part of computer history for a really long time, which really shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Gaming has always been a big part of the human experience. We hone skills. Through games, we bond socially with others, We explore ideas, we test philosophies, or sometimes we just want to beat up on some sort of I don't know,

Martian Robo Overlord or something. Now, back in nineteen fifty eight, before personal computers were even a thing, there was a physicist named William Higginbotham who used an analog computer and in oscilloscope to create a game similar to what would later become Pong. And a few years later and sixty two, Stephen Russell at m I T created Space War, which was a predecessor to the Arcade miss Genes that would follow more than a decade later. These games were built

on specialized hardware. We're talking like mainframe computers. You have to go ten years into the future to look about the first PC games because personal computers weren't really a thing till the mid to late seventies. For example, in nineteen seventy six, will Crowther, who actually was one of the people who worked on the arpa net that was a predecessor to the Internet. It was a network that

that ended up pioneering the technologies that would power the Internet. Well, he wasn't just busy helping make computers talk to each other. He was also developing a text based game in four tran called Colossal Cave Adventure for the PDP ten main frame, which is not exactly a PC I grant you, but other programmers began to work on the project in order to pour it over to different computer systems, including personal computer systems, and these text based games were kind of

like a role playing game. It would spell out what is going on in any given room. You would get a paragraph of text and it would describe your surroundings and things that are in the area, and you would have to type in whatever it was you wanted to do. So, for example, you might say, there's the description says you are in a room, there is an old chair in the corner, and a door leads out to the north,

and you might say sit in chair. And if the programmers had thought about that, then you would get a response. Perhaps it would be something such as you sit in the chair, that's a load off, or the chair collapses under your weight. You're now sitting on a pile of lumber, or whatever the result maybe and you would just go turn through turn. Not exactly the cutting edge in technology by today's standards, but it was an early attempt at creating games for computers. And there are a lot of

these text based games in the day. I remember things like the Zork series or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and of course the Leather Goddesses of Phobos and yes, that's a real game, you can look it up. Before long, a host of programmers began to build graphics based games. They began to create things that weren't just text related. You could control little characters or perhaps control a vehicle of some sort. It was all very primitive at the time.

The graphics were very basic, and so were the sounds. Display resolution and processor power and sound ability was replacing really hefty limitations on what a game developer could do. Not that it stopped people from pushing the envelope. There have always been game developers who have been creating games that push hardware to its limits, and so it was even in the early days. But those limits were much lower back then. And then Moore's law just kept on

plugging away. You know that observation that generally speaking today we interpret it as computers get about twice as powerful every twenty four months, as they were before. So in two years the computers that you buy are twice as powerful as the ones from two years previous, and two years in the future they will be twice as powerful as the ones that are here today. Well, that was still going along, and so you were getting increasing amounts

of processing power. But if you start off small, then doubling doesn't mean you get a huge amount, right, not at the beginning. It over time, yes, But let's say that you know you can lift twenty pounds, and then you train and train and train and train, and now you can lift twice that you can lift forty pounds. Forty pounds in the grand scheme of things, still isn't that much. But then you train and train, and then it's eighty pounds, and then a hundred sixty, and then

pretty soon you're talking about really, really big numbers. Well, in those early days of personal computers, we weren't talking big numbers so well, developers were creating games that could wish hardware to its limits. It was still pretty modest. Then something big happened, and it happened in the mid nineties,

and that big something was three D graphics. Now that was not three D in the you need special glasses in order to play this game sense, but rather that the rendered objects on screen appeared to have three dimensions to them. They appeared to have depth, and that was a lot different from what had been there. It used to be that games all like just two dimensional characters, there was no third dimension to them. Games like Doom and Quake started to support these three dimensional graphics, and

you needed hardware to support that capability. In the early days, it was the CPUs job to do all of that three D rendering. Now, obviously the CPU has to do a lot, so pushing three D rendering onto the CPU as well made it work even harder. So if you companies began to explore options with expansion cards that would take on some of the work that the CPU would have to do. Video cards had been around since the nineteen eighties, but none of them were really true three

D graphics cards. Those would come in the mid nineties, and one of the earliest of those was the Verge pc I expansion card from S three. Verge spelled v I r g E stood for Virtual Reality Graphics Engine, so they had pretty high aspirations back in those mid nineties. We're talking like right here, so this would be during the first attempt to bring virtual reality out into the

public consciousness. This was the one that ultimately crashed in on itself and and ultimately had it set virtual reality back by about a decade because people were so disenchanted by it that no one was really willing to pour any money into it for quite some time. Well. The first card, this verge pc I expansion card, had four whole megabytes of memory and a clock speed of sixty six mega hurts. Now at the time that was impressive, but by today's standards, it wouldn't even measure up to

a bargain ben graphics card. What it did do, however, was created a new era, the era of the hardcore gamer, because now you could actually get a supplemental card on your computer that would allow you to play these advanced games um and there had never been anything like that really before. And tons of other graphics cards followed, both from S three that was the company that made the verge pc i'm a card, and lots of other manufacturers as well, So there are some pretty big names that

got serious traction in those days. You had a t I was way before the radion days, and they introduced the Rage three D card. I remember when that came out. Three D f X launched the Voodoo one, which was incredibly influential. I'll have to do a full episode about three D f X sometime in the future. That that wholes stories a little weird. The Voodoo one also did something the other early three D cards did not do.

It focused solely on rendering three D graphics. Other early cards would fuse three D graphics rendering with two D graphics rendering, so you'd have both of them handled by the same graphics card. But with the Voodoo one, you actually had to have a second graphics card just to handle the two D graphics. It would work alongside the Voodoo one in order for you to get the full functionality. And it doesn't stop with the Voodoo one either. Nvidio got into the game, literally in this case, with a

launch of the n V three in nine. Later, still in nine, a Canadian company called Matrox decided to wade into the fray and they had their own three D acceleration cards, and Intel tried to compete in this new space with the I seven forty graphics cards, though the product failed to get much traction in the marketplace, and

it didn't get very many positive reviews either. For the most part, the graphics card market dominated by a T I in Vidio three D f X, and S three in those early years, So this creates some level of confusion for people who want to pursue PC gaming. Let's take myself as an example. I was playing PC games back then. I wasn't a console gamer at this time, in the mid to late nineties. I was a PC gamer, but my PC was just a basic PC. I didn't

have like a dedicated graphics card. And once these games started to get this advanced and there was really more or less a requirement for you to get a three D graphics card, it was hard for me to figure out what I should do next. There were so many different cards on the market, and they all had different abilities, and I wasn't really sure what any of them were.

And and they also many of them had proprietary approaches, which meant that you could buy a game that requires the three D graphics accelerator card and you have one of those cards in your computer, but you have one from a different manufacturer, and because it's not compatible, you can't play the game even though from a raw power standpoint, you'd be fine. It's your card is completely capable of

churning out the the output that you would need. But because of that proprietary approach and the incompatibility issue, the game still won't run on your machine. This was really frustrating. Um, you know, before that, before the graphics cards and sound cards really became a big deal, you just had to really worry about the motherboard and the CPU, plus any expansion cards you might want in order to hook up

gear to your computer. But now you suddenly had to take those three D graphics cards into account, and this was a non trivial task. You had all these competing products on the market, and you didn't necessarily know which firmware, which which proprietary approach rather would be the best one. You might go out and buy a card that today had support for most of the games that are on the market, and then a year from then it might turn out that all the games that are coming out

don't support that format anymore. They go to one of the competitors. So it's a very confusing and frustrating time. It meant that game developers also we're going through this, They had to decide which graphics cards were they going to support with their their games, Because every time you add on another graphics card to support, you add on time that it takes, and money and and other resources that it takes to develop the game so that will

run on that platform. So from a game developer standpoint, having lots of different incompatible formats out there, it's frustrating because you have to make those decisions. If you try to support everything, it's going to take you longer to get your game out, which means it's going to be more expensive to you. It means you're gonna have to sell more copies of it in order to get a

return on your investment. And if you choose to not support everyone, then you have to figure out which card makes the most sense to support, which one is going to get you the most potential sales. It was not a great time to have to make these decisions. It was really kind of uh difficult. So it was a total bummer if you were a gamer and you felt like you had made bad decisions, or just that you had made a decision that turned out later on to become bad. Like at the time it wasn't bad, but

later down the road it did. Building a PC got more complicated and the games kept coming out, and so that opened up an opportunity for a company to come along and serve that market. So instead of building identical, identical beige boxes with like standard specs to them, this company would design gaming rigs with gamers in mind. So the company would offer up various options for gamers to choose from. So it wasn't even just like here are

three different computer models. There were a lot of options for gamers to choose which come opponents they wanted included, and that would obviously affect everything from the performance of the PC to its ultimate price. Now, all of the actual work and building the rig would be done by the company. The gamer wouldn't have to do it, so that takes that responsibility off the gamers shoulders. That company was alien Ware. But here's a little bit of trivia.

It wasn't originally called alien Ware. In fact, it wasn't originally meant to be a PC gaming rig company. The original name of the company back in nineteen was Psychi, and it was based in Miami, Florida still is. In fact, to this day, alien Ware is still in Miami. The founder was Nelson Gonzalez, and he started the company with a ten thousand dollar personal credit loan. He didn't set out to make gaming rigs right away either. He was

just going to build personal computers. But then he noticed that many of the people he knew, like his friends and family, were coming to him for advice on how to make a personal computer run certain games that either were are performing on their current machine or not even working at all. And Gonzalez understood the complexities of the PC space at the time and helped get those computers

in shape. You know, his friends and family. He helped them out and he made sure that they could run the latest games and they didn't have these compatibility issues. So he then developed a business plan, and that business plan was direct selling to customers. It was a a very transparent sort of approach where customers could come straight through to purchase these PCs, which increasingly became gaming rigs.

He was still making regular PC computers at the time, but he was finding more and more of his time dedicated to building out these gaming rigs for a gamers in He convinced his friend Alex Aguila to join him at his company, and by the end of ninety seven, the two decided it was time to pivot the business and focus solely on building PC gaming rigs. They said farewell to the standard PC business and went all in

on gaming now. As I said at the top of the show, I had the opportunity to talk to the general manager of alien Ware, Frank Hazor, and we had a nice conversation. So we'll listen in on that interview right after we take this break to thank our sponsor. First of all, thank you so much for joining me today. I very much appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. And I would like to to start at the beginning. I find that's always a good place and

talk about the earliest days. We're talking about alien Ware, a brand that has really established itself as the forefront for especially for high performing gaming rigs. But how did it all get started? Well, it starts with an idea, UM pretty simply. UM. We were very passionate gamers at the time and UM mostly playing on PC, some on console, and a lot of really great games were coming out

on the PC. UM around that time, we were working with Doom, Doom too, UM Quake, UH, and these games were really pushing the performance boundaries of what PCs were able to do then, and there was also really hard to get to work correctly on PCs. Back then, we had a sixteen bit Doss operating system, thirty two bit Windows operating system. Graphics cards were just starting to emerge on the market for consumers, and there was two D cards and three D cards, so it was really hard

to get these games to work correctly. So are our CEO UM had started a PC company and I was just trying to build like regular PCs at the time, and a lot of friends kept coming him and saying, Hey, I want to play these games and I want to play with you. Guys, can you help me tweak my machine to do it or build me one to do it? And he would help them out, and little by little it just started forming into a business, and he reached out to one of his friends, Alex, and Alex joined him,

and then they reached out to another friend. That friend introduced me to them, and uh and an alien work was born. So this is a great point that you make, this idea of of how in those early days when PC games were really starting to enter in a new level of sophistication, I mean PC gaming obviously had been an element since the birth of the personal computer, but around the mid nineties is when we really started to see it blossom and and push the boundaries of what

computers were capable of doing. It really was a complicated system to to try and keep up with the demands of the latest games. You had all these different cards, some of which might not be compatible with certain motherboards, which to the to the uninitiated, to people who don't

build computers, that creates a real barrier, right. It creates that level of intimidation of getting into PC gaming, something that still really exists today, and there may be people out there who do not realize that not all processors are compatible with all motherboards, and you may have issues with certain graphics cards, and so to create a business around solving those issues so that the consumer doesn't have to think about it obviously has a great deal of appeal.

What sort of um what are some of the things that gamers need to think about when they are talking about gaming rigs. You know, we're talking about you know, graphics processing. What what are the sort of metrics you guys look at when you're building out your machines. Yeah, piece of gaming was absolutely very complicated initially. Fortunately it's gotten a lot simpler over time on the software we'd have.

We've had solutions like Steam and UM and origins Solution e A uses Origin for their games, and what they've done with these digital distribution solutions is that they've made them a lot easier for us to maintain our games, to download our games, to patch them up, to deal

with DRM UM and c D keys. In the old days, used to have discs, multiple discs to install a game, used to have to keep your c D key somewhere around or your game key somewhere around, and if you lost it, you were kind of s O l um and And not only was it difficult to do that, but then there was always patches that you had to go out to these obscure websites to try and download, and sometimes they were viruses built into those patches because

they were malicious code that other people would bundle into the executables, And it was always hard to maintain and keep up with all the patches that are out there. It was just very difficult. So we got really really lucky with these UH innovations that companies like Steam and and the others built, UM to help simplify this whole experience.

And then on the hardware side, companies like Alien where we've been in providing turnkey gaming systems for folks so that they don't have to worry about the PC itself, the technology that goes into it, maintaining the technology, servicing it if and when it fails, um when someone comes any and where they're coming to us because they want to focus on playing the games. They don't want to have to worry about the tech and then the potential

headaches that come associated with it. And and that's really been what we've built our business on is selling folks. Look, if you have the time, the knowledge, and the expertise to build your own system, by all means you're always

gonna build better than what anybody else. But when your time becomes a little bit more limited and your patients may be a little bit more limited, and you want to just focus on your game and not have to worry about the hardware, by that experience, that's what before. So what we've done over the years is we've done a lot of work to try and simplify making those decisions.

If you look at how we sell our systems today and how we offer them customers are different kind of prefigurations for them to kind of see, okay, well this is like a mid range system, this is a really high end system. We give them the right communication that they need to know about what their systems capabilities are

going to be. We tell them if this is going to be a ten A d P gaming system or if this is a four K capable rig um, and then of course if they want to customize, if we offer them the options to be able to do it. But the whole thing that what we've tried to do is we tried to simplify the gaming experience for us, to make it less intimidating, and to and to help grow that's quite frankly, which we've been very successful in doing.

PC gaming is gonna or gaming in general, I should say, not just PC, but gaming is gonna grow to be a thirty billion dollar business this year um, which is pretty amazing, something that exceeded war Wildnest expectations and the approach of alien ware. Again, not to harp on it too much, but this idea of creating the solutions for the gamer, for people who haven't built a machine that's

a non trivial issue. I mean we I know gamers who consider themselves console gamers, largely because they find the the idea of trying to build a gaming rig to be intimidating. They are worried that if they build one that the specs will become obsolete so quickly that it will not have justified the amount of time they put

into it. They've heard horror stories about people building rigs and then you get to that magic moment where you flip the power switch and nothing happens, and you aren't really sure what it was that went wrong, and then

you have to work it all out. So something like this, where you have the the gaming rigs built uh and you can even customize it in the ordering process, makes life a lot easier to get into that PC gaming world where you know you can finally find out if all those PC gamers who have been boasting for years that the gameplay and graphics are far superior to any console, you can finally find out for yourself and for anyone who has has not gone through even just as just

as a a this is my dream rig experience, I do recommend actually building out a gaming rig using the the alien ware approach, because I've done that on multiple occasions and I'm just it's always my alright, if I sell a book, this is the rig I'm buying like this, that next book deal, that next whatever, that big bonuses. This is the rig because it is you could build a real beast with those those tools. So tell me a little bit more about what's the story behind the

name alien ware. Did that that come from anything in particular or was it just something like a cool idea or was there an inspiration drawn from elsewhere? Because I can tell you what Wikipedia says. Be careful with what Wikipedia says, because you'd be amazed at how many founders of Adien where there are up there that we've never heard of um on Wikipedia puppy number right. But yeah, it's a really interesting story. You know, back in in the late nine these The X Files is a really

popular show at the time. And um Nelson are our CEO and then the original founder to the company who came up with the concept of amy and ware and already the concept of sending PC gaming systems. He's a very creative individual. Um he actually created pretty much all of the art that um Anya where ever put out all of our graphics and art and industrial design with the help of Astro Studios in the for the majority

of of Any Wars early years. And um, you know, he was thinking to himself once he had the idea for building this gaming company, He's thinking to himself, but we're going to kind of be building the best computers in the world. We're gonna be using some of the latest and greatest hardware to run the latest and greatest software that's out there. Games in particular, these games are the ones that are like pushing the limits as to what's possible in computing at the time and still are

in a lot of ways. So he was he was thinking about what he's going to call this comp aye, and he was kind of putting together hardware and software and thinking, well, we're going to be, you know, kind of state of the art advanced technologies, and he just figured Aliens, we tend to think have superior technology to what we have here. So they kind of put it all together, hardware, software, Aliens and that's pretty where the name emerged from. And the aesthetic really developed pretty early

on too. I mean, obviously the very first Alien where rigs that came out, they some of them included early early desktops included colors that you just didn't see out there, things that really set them apart. But shortly after that you got away from the the standard sort of box tower design of desktops and he started getting into some really interesting um curved lines and and vents, the machines that looked like they went fast even while they were

sitting still. I mean, I think the Predator desktop is still one of those that I look at and I just love that design. Was that something that came from the same group. Yeah, Um, it's an interesting history. You know, when you're a really small company, and we were a small company and we grew organically. We never took an investment in the early days. Um we we we really grew everything based on the sales that were coming in

and just reinvesting little by little into the company. So we knew that we wanted we had a vision for the kind of products that we wanted to develop, and little by little we started realizing that vision. We wanted to bring this type of design that Apple at the time and still even today had brought to consumer electronics. We wanted to bring that to PCs, in particular PC

games or PC gaming systems. Back then, you may recall pretty much every computer was like a beige, boring box and the only company that was actually doing any hint of industrial design was IBM because they had black that they were using UM and that was about as far

as they had gone. An Apple had come out with the Imax and these really cool designs and colors, and they were adding life into these these devices, and Nelson was like, looking, we eventually want to go and build our own product from the ground up, UM, but we can't afford to do it yet. I mean these to build something like that, it's millions of dollars and we

just couldn't afford it. We're such a small company. So we said to ourselves, what's the what's kind of like, what's the most we could do within what we afford

at that time, And that's where we went out. We started looking for some really cool cases that existed on the market out there, out in Taiwan and in China, and then we started working on painting them so that we can give customers the ability to know personalize their experience with the really really cool paint job and color motif and everything that would just stand out in a crowd of beige computers and boring old designs, and that's

really what started and we experimented with that. We thought that that would succeed. It took off massively, and thank to that, we were able to go off and create the Predator project, and that project, the Predator chassis, that case has defined the look of Amian work computers ever

since that we came out with it. Our notebooks UM had a very similar design when we came out our first gaming notebook and the industry's first gaming notebook, and then even then, if you look at our products today, you'll see that there's several characteristics about them that are much more evolved and and more current and futuristic as compared to what we built with the Predator back then, and in the notebook we called the skull cap UM,

but they still pay homage to that original industrial design and that and uh that legacy of identity that we established with that Predator chassis back then, I mean nowadays.

To bring a product to market, for example, like one of our desktop, like the Area fifty one desktop, we spent over ten million dollars in research and development bringing that product to market, and every single element of that of that design is completely If you look at it, that's a really cool triangular design that we offer today. We just updated it to A A and D throughout River sixteen core process or. It's like the fastest desktop

ever ever built before. And every element of it, you know, down to the fans that we're using, the liquid cooling system, the paint that we're using, the material composition, the architecture of the chassis and the construction of it, the shape of its unique. It's never been done before, So you know, we're we're pushing the limit even more and more and

more and innovating more than we've ever done. And thankful it's it's it's all thanks to our customers for believing in us, trusting us, and investing in us that we've been able to continue to push these limits. And with that particular design, that triangular one. I got a chance to see that at E three and it is an amazing piece of technology. It's very clever. I like the design where it allows for more efficient cooling of the

various elements. Obviously, now that we're in a time where overclocking is becoming more and more of a stand or approach from a lot of power gamers out there. You've got multiple high powered graphics processing units in there, you've got to have a good heat management system or else. I mean, we all know heat and electronics are not best buddies. They do things break down quickly if they

get too hot. So seeing that design and seeing that approach, I thought was very interesting, very clever, And for those out there who aren't familiar with the process for building out these sort of things you're talking about, uh, you know, early designs, going into prototype models, going into production models, going into manufacturing models, and and this is a very long process for any piece of of any kind of

product that comes out on mass production. So it's one of those, uh processes that I think behind the scenes that a lot of people just don't think about when they see something brand new on the shelf. They don't realize the number of hours that go into any given product for that to be out there. So I appreciate you kind of enlightening us on that. And I also want to point out that early reviews of Alien where

really gave it a big boost as well. In fact, there was a magazine article that that ended up getting uh, a really great push for Alien where when the reviewer said that if there were any way he could hold on to the Alien where desktop he was given to review and not return it, he would very much appreciate that. So I think that's probably the best review any computer manufacturer can hope for, when the person giving the review

admits outright, they just want to hold onto that machine. Yeah, that was That was a defining moment in our history, UM for a couple of reasons. One because getting a great review is always awesome, and we're very sensitive to what the press and especially our customers say about us in our products and UM you know, pretty much any comment, any any question, any complaint about anything that reaches us at at Alien were headquarters. Those answered because if we

mess up, we want our customers to acknowledge. We want to acknowledge to our customers that we did so we want to learn from it and we want to improve. And if we didn't necessarily mess up, we want to defend ourselves and explain why. But listening to customers feedback, listening to what are the experts in the industry, like pressing journalists have to say about our products UM and acting upon that is has been a key contributor not only to our initial success but also to all of

our success up to now. It's because of our ability to listen and be so sensitive to that information, because we we've never forgotten where we came from. We really came from, of course, that idea, the original idea that Nelson had, but we also came from that review, which told us what we did well and what we needed and what we needed to do improve of on. But it also gave us confidence that we were really onto somethings. Ye at that time, what we were doing was had

never been done before. Nobody was building computers optimized to play games. There was no market data as to how big this market is. There was nobody to follow and draft from. UM. We modeled ourselves after Apple from an industrial design and identity perspective and iconic nature UM, and then we modeled ourselves after Dell from a go to market UM business model type of perspective. We knew we wanted to offer customization and personalization and we wanted to

focus on being a primarity direct type of business. But we you know, we could model ourselves in the business that way and the way in which we wanted to approach our products, but no idea like what these gaming computers were and if the people wanted to buy them, and if people saw value in them, and if they

cared about them. And those initial reviews gave us that confidence, and of course gave us the awareness and the exposure to them parcus so that people knew what we were doing and that phone started ringing off the hook, and that confidence was it was critical. Really, I don't know that if we wouldn't have gotten that confidence at that time that we have any and we're here today because we would have maybe thought we had a done owner had if that reviewer would have said, this is really cool,

but it's five thousand dollars. I don't know why anybody in the right mind would buy this thing. Um, it's not worth it, and we would have been like, maybe

you shouldn't have done this. I mean, I don't know for sure that wasn't necessarily a do or die moment um, but it was certainly a moment I remember having the confidence to say, yeah, we're onto something here, let's keep moving forward at this thing, right And then in had PC World named the original Area fifty one desktop one of its best PCs of all time, they listed twenty five different machines, and Area fifty one was one of the ones listed, so clearly things were on the right track.

You already mentioned the fact that you that the company was the first to offer a laptop specifically for gaming.

There are other firsts that came out to You had the first liquid cool desktop in two thousand four with the a l X. So there's been a lot of innovation on going on with the Alien where the brand has been associated with that both in the components that you include inside your your rigs, but also obviously that that aesthetic, that thing that really sets the Alien ware apart from just a first glance, whether it's the triangular shape of the new Area fifty one machine, or it's

custom lights and and and cool vents and uh, really nice paint jobs. What do you see as the future for Alien where we've we've got a lot of stuff that's battling it out to try and really emerge as a new era in gaming, whether it's augmented reality or virtual reality. But from your perspective, what do you see as the future for the Alien were brand? Um? I mean, there's an incredible amount of opportunity for us ahead. You know,

gaming has more momentum today than it's ever had. The amount of innovation that's going on, the amount of new products that are coming into this space, some even from our competitors. UM, the innovation that's coming in here, it's phenomenal. And you know, we're no longer a niche for like the first fifteen years of our company's history. I no longer go out there and with my Indian work shirt and people don't ask me what is that? Like, people

know already what Alien war is. When I tell people, you know, we do PC gaming, They're like, oh, yeah, my son is a huge PC's Minecraft, or he's playing Overwatch, or he's playing this or that. So it's an incredible time right now. It's really exciting because not only are we benefiting from this incredible momentum, but we helped build it. And that's an incredible thing to be a part of.

UM and you know, work an essential piece of the history of PC gaming and UH and I think an essential contributor to helping to get to where it is today in many ways, at least from a hardware perspective. So it's the amount of momentum, the amount of energy, the amount of investment and everything that the entire industry is putting into piece of gaming is It's unprecedented and way beyond anything we ever anticipated in terms of opportunities that I see ahead. I think the sports is massive.

I genuinely believe that the sports is going to become the most popular sport in the world in our lifetime. We are already seeing the sports move into the Asian Games in two and that's just another step in the path to becoming potentially an Olympic sport. We're seeing the sports being broadcast through the type of channels that you would expect, like online streaming platforms like Twitch dot tv

or Caffeine dot tv. But we're also seeing our partnership with Elague bring E sports to mainstream television as well, to start kind of bridging those audiences and introducing it to television and giving access stability to folks that enjoy watching TV in that type of a setting to this incredible um culture and this incredible sport that's emerged here, and I've seen people get engaged from all types of ages and groups and demographics into the League E sports broadcast.

They see it as a as a sport like any other. There's competition in it, there's skill, there's passion, their stories behind each of the athletes, and um, it's got all the right elements for it to be an extremely popular sport, which it already is. But ultimately that is why I think it will become females popular sport. And within that, the opportunity we see for the entire gaming industry and the one that work capital lasting on with alien ware

is the hardware element of the sports is massive. I mean, from my perspective, I don't think there's any other sport out there where the athlete depends on their equipment outside of vehicle racing, where then there is any sports. I mean that your hardware can literally mean the difference no matter how good of a player you are between walking home with millions of dollars are walking home a loser

with nothing. If that machine overheats, it locks up, it blue screens, it starts to lag, any issues occur, it's a very expensive mistake or it's a very expensive issue.

So our commitment to gamers, especially supports gamers, is that quality will always be number one and everything that we do, and if we don't get it right for any reason, then there have been instances in the past where we haven't like any company, the difference in what we're gonna do is that we're going to immediately listen, respond, acknowledge if and when we failed, and fix it immediately. And that's been the commitment that we've delivered upon for years now.

Quality is above everything else that we do. Performance is important, industrial design is important, Our service and support are extremely important. But a lot of other companies will sacrifice those things, will sacrifice quality in the sake of those things. They'll give you more performance, but they'll stress the system a

little bit too much. They'll give you great performance and a great configuration and a really sexy thin form factor of six months after you own it, it starts to overheat, as dust builds up in the fans, and as it starts to lose it thermal efficiency because they pushed the limits so much without any thermal headroom and old head room at all, to give you that sexy look, because they know it's going to sell well. That they pushed it too far, and it fails our commitment because we

know how gaming is more than just for fun. Nowadays, gaming is becoming It has become a profession for many people out there. Our commitment is that we're going to give you the tools you need to enjoy yourself. Enjoy yourself with these systems for extended periods of time. We design our systems with at least a four year warranty option, So every computer you get from US has a four year warranty option. That's an incredible responsibility for us, because

we self warranty the machine. We don't give it to a third party. We don't, you know, sell you an extended warranty contract from a reseller anything like that. If you call us three and a half years after you purchased the machine with an issue, we are going to repair that issue. You're going to get a replacement on on site service technician in your house to repair it, or whatever the case needs to be to get you

back up and running at our expense. And that's important because we get to design the product up front to ensure that it's going to have the quality in their necessary so that you don't have those issues three and a half years down the road. So I can go on to a whole rant about quality and the importance of it. I hope it gives you an idea, but e sports there's a critical area in the future of growth. UM, we're doing a lot to help UH accelerate that our

partnership with the league. Check that out if you haven't seen it at broadcasts on different turner networks around the country. UM. We also have in China. We just actually announced our championship last weekend at China. Joy I was in Invijing. I'm sorry in Shanghai announcing this. But we have a something called the Indian Ware Game Arena where we hold a thousand East Worts matches. This year alone, we've held the thousands, will hold about two thousand before the end

of the year. And this sports platform is intended to raisit the gap between the average gamer and the professional gamers. Today, there's a lot of professional e sports leagues like the League and es L and others and the into Extreme Masters. But to get into that league, you have to kind of be part of a professional team. To get into that professional team, you kind of have to go through

an introduction somehow. If you can reach out to them, hope that they respond to you, show them the skills you've got, and you kind of have to be really really damn it's almost like the NFL to get into a professional e sports league. But we're doing with the A G A D Anywhere Game Arena because we've created a platform where it's open basically any gamers to come in.

They can form a team, they can compete, they can start thanks a little by little, getting to know other players, getting to build teams together and eventually grow with us into becoming that e sports athlete. At the same time, we were with professional sports teams in the region in China that take on certain members that are aspiring to become professional e sports athletes and they take them under their wing and they teach them how to improve their game.

They coach them basically, and they compete against them to improve their game. So it's this platform that creates a funnel to help create more E sports athletes and get them into the league and get them into um that the professional sport. Eventually, it's almost like a minor league, if you will, like what baseball does. So we're doing a We're doing a lot of things around these sports. UM the other areas of virtual reality and augmented reality,

we believe big in those categories. We think that virtual and augmented reality are going to be as disruptive over in our lives over the next twenty years as the Internet has been over the past twenty years. If you think about how the Internet has changed the way in which we learn, form education question that we typed into Google or as theory or a SCALEXA, the way in which we learn, the one which can we communicate, whether it be through social media, networks, through email, through voice

over IP connections while we're playing a game. The way we communicate is has changed completely thanks to the Internet. The way in which we entertain has completely changed over the Internet as well. So you think about solutions like, yeah, we have Netflix and Hulu and these online streaming platforms, but most of our entertainment today comes in through some type of Internet solution, even social media. You laugh at

a at a gift, or you see a funny online video. Um, I get an email that makes you laugh, You play an online game, you watch a movie. You do these things. Those three things learning, um, communication, and education completely disrupted by the Internet over the past twenty years. And we take all these things with us now in our pocket in the smartphone right, which is kind of crazy to think about it. We've only been a really doing that for about ten years or so since the launch at

the iPhone. It was done be for that, but much smaller numbers. Virtual reality and a mentor reality. We believe we're gonna do the same thing. We believe that are the way in which we communicate will be done, will be done less in a blind fashion like we do it today, where we're only really depending on audio for

the most part. Um and a camera webcam solution. There's always been like this disconnected personalization um or with a webcam, it's like it just doesn't feel really natural, and that's why I don't think webcams have really taken off as much as a phone conversation has. But when you do a in room type of virtual reality, multiple people are in one instance of a room burntual reality interaction, it's a really cool and fascinating experience. And today it's very

cartoonish and animated. But in the future, you'll imagine it's gonna look as good as real time video looks today. You'll you'll actually be able to will actually be able to see each other like you've seen in sci fi movies through augmented reality solutions and virtual reality solutions. So I joke with people that it's the true human teleportation technology.

But instead of teleporting our bodies like we've always thought about from sci fi movies and everything, v R and a R will allow us to teleport our minds anywhere around the room, anywhere around the world, and we can be with anyone anywhere, and basically at any time, you'll be able to transport yourself into the future, and you'll be able to transport yourself into the past. Not real

of course, not time machine. But if you think about a movie and it's setting, and a setting of a movie being an old Western, you'll be able to teleport yourself into that fictional setting that whatever, whoever, whatever that company, or whoever produced that content decided to create for this, so you can, joking jokingly, we can all be We can be having this interview in a you know, in a in a in a restaurant in if we wanted to, in New York, for example, and and that environment can

be all around us, and I would be looking at you and we will be at a table actually having that conversation from the comfort of our homes. Now that sounds really crazy and far fetched, and people talking to listen to me, and they say, this guy is a dreamer. But when I remind them that, you know, a smartphone

is only ten years old. And if I told you twenty years ago that you'd be carrying a computer which imagine what computers look like back then, in your pocket, and it would be a thousand times faster and be able to communicate with anybody you want to, and you'd be able to do all the amazing things that we do with our smartphones today, they would have said, your dreamer crazy. M hmm. Yeah, it's about this category. It

is when I appreciate that. It's great to hear from someone who has that sort of vision and passion because it's the sort of thing I've been talking about for a while as well. This, uh, this very disruptive technology. That disruptive does not necessarily means something bad. Obviously, it can mean something amazing. I mean, the Internet has truly been a disruptive technology. The world is totally different from

the pre Internet days. You know, I while the Internet was a thing when I was a kid, there was no web when I was a kid. That was that came when I was in college. Uh, And so really, most people's awareness of the Internet really didn't arise till later, and then just to actually have lived through that, have seen the birth of the web, the evolution of it, it's coming into play as a marketplace. It's the you know, the the Internet bubble bursting and then it reforming stronger

than ever before. The argument over whether or not Web two point oh even means anything, all of that was really fascinating to watch. And I agree with you and that I think we're seeing the same sort of thing the very earliest days for virtual reality and augmented reality. You know, virtual reality has had a couple of false starts in the past, largely limited by the the hardware at the time, the hardware and the software which wasn't quite up to the task to meet the expectations people

had for it. After the various science fiction media versions of what virtual reality was going to be versus what it really was when you put on that thirty pound helmet and you saw, you know, pterodactyl made out of four polygons. Uh, it's a much different world today and to see where it's going. I really do hope to see VR and a R take off in a big,

big way over the next few years. It's it's uh still got some barriers in front of it, including the various competing platforms as well as the the price to entry right now is still fairly high. But I think that those, just like other technologies, those issues will work themselves out over time as the best approaches and the technology itself becomes less expensive. So I really have high

hopes for that as well. And to touch also on your point about e sports and how that has become a big component or and it's growing in importance, I would also add that the the culture of live streaming games UH and let's plays and things of that nature has exploded over the last few years where it might have been a few years ago. I might mention this to some people and they say, you watch other people

play video games? What what's that about. Well, now, I've got a friend, she's the mom of a couple of kids, and she was telling me just the other day about how much she likes to watch these let's plays that UH have these guys playing games and making jokes the whole time. And I'm thinking, well, this is this is a mom of of young kids. She's not she's not in the game air culture, but she's already aware of this element of gaming, so we're seeing that continue to

grow as well. I think that you are right on target about gamer culture. You know, it's just getting stronger year over year. And you could even argue that the the long time between console generations means that gamers who follow console games often are feeling like they're being left behind. Over time. They might get you, they might get a half hearted update right or what could be viewed as a half hearted update, because it's not a full jump

in generation. It's technically the same generation but slightly better specs. Meanwhile, you have the PC gamers who are customizing their rigs to to their design where you know, it's playing the games they want to play. UH. And you know, it's interesting because I've seen PC games Ride and arc where for a while they were on top and then the consoles started to come into the foreground, and then you

see that switch back and forth. I feel like the PC games are firmly grabbing the spotlight right now, and you're seeing the consoles being pushed a little further back. UH. Probably will see that cycle continue over and over again until the end of time. But it is interesting to have seen it happen a few times at this point because there was a time where post video game crash, I just became a PC gamer. For many years, I

skipped the Nintendo years, I skipped Super Nintendo. It wasn't until uh PS two, I think, before I came back over to consoles. So PC gaming, I think is bigger than ever. I mean, it's it's clear if you go to any of these uh, whether it's a trade show event or something like the Penny Arcade expo which is all about all sorts of different games, PC gaming is huge there. Uh. I think we're just going to continue to see that. And I can't wait to see the

next Alien wear rigs. I can't wait to to finally pull the trigger and buy one because I keep, I keep very gently suggesting it to my wife, uh and that hasn't hasn't yet paid off yet, But I feel like I'm close. I'm real close. So maybe I'll have one of those monster rigs on my own before too much longer. Thank you so much for joining me and telling me more about the back story of Alien where kind of the philosophy of the company. Where you guys are going, I really very much appreciate it. Yeah, I

really appreciate the opportunity. Um, it's a it's a really exciting time for us and a really exciting time to be a gamer. And first and foremost, we're gamers at anywhere.

This is our our lifeblood. We love this. Um. You know, our jobs are hard, but in a lot of ways they're easy too, because we're making the biggest, baddest, amazing toys for ourselves first and foremost, and that we were just very lucky that there's a lot of people out there that are like us, that appreciate what we're building. So this is a lot of fun and I really appreciate you giving us an opportunity to tell the story and share it with everybody. Well, I do have one

last question for you. Do you have a particular game that you consider to be your favorite? It can be from any era. Yeah, well right now, not my all time favorite, But right now I'm playing a Player Unknown Battlegrounds. Oh yeah, a lot of on. Yeah, we're having a lot of fun with that. Um, we're doing squad matches every night. Now. Unfortunately, I was up till I'm less like um doing that, and it's been a rough week. Because I've been up so late with the guys hanging

out and playing. Before that, I was playing Overwatch. But my favorite all time game is was Half Life. What Half Life did is that I've always been predominantly a first person shooter or an RTS road time strategy gamer, and um, what Half Life did for me for the first time is as a first person genre game, it brought in a storyline that was really engaging and fascinating.

And you didn't want to just play the game because the graphics were awesome, or the bosses were big and bad an amazing, and the game was challenging and the weapons were awesome. You played it because you really wanted to see how this story ended, and you were You

were captured by the storyline. And I think that that changed games, especially the first person genre moving forward, where all those traditional elements that I spoke about the game, the graphics, the guns, the weapons, the bosses, all these things, they weren't what defined a great game anymore. And everybody who's tried to use that recipe since and and solely rely on it has for the most part, not had

a huge success. It's the storyline that has really helped define the success of games, whether it's in the game itself or it's a peripheral storyline like in the case of Overwatched, it's a story about the characters that exists outside the game itself, and the game is like one element of their lives. Um. It's really it adds a more personal connection to the game, UM, and it creates

retention of the game. And I just feel and at least maybe it wasn't the first one to do it, but in my recollection of kind of my gaming career, my gaming life, half life was the one that stood out to me at that moment where I was like, wait, this is more than a game. This is like a movie. This is a story, and I want to keep playing to learn more about it. Well as as a fellow Gordon Freeman fan, I say, that's a great answer. I hope you win many Chicken dinners in the future, and

thanks once in second place. A few times i've I've one of the reasons I need won a new gaming rig so I can play pub G properly because my current one is just not yet. It's just not up to the task. I just when it when you're dropping frames that much in a game where you need to see where everybody is. It is not it's not ideal. So that's that's one of the driving factors for me. I've been I've been really chopping at the bit to

play some pub g So, well, thank you again. It makes better if it makes you any better, John, to imagine what I'm playing on, I have access to whatever I want. I still drop the game is up there to optimize that thing it is. It is an early access. So yeah, that's true. In their defense, and yesterday or the day before, they came out with a patch that's a little rough. It introduced a bunch of lag and they acknowledged it, which is cool if the same thing

that we do when something wrong happens. You know, they acknowledged it, they apologized for it, and they they guaranteed us that they're going to fix it. But it made it even more challenging. But you know what I found fascinating is all this lag was introduced into this game and we were all still playing it. Yeah, that's that's the sign of a very captivating game when you can't when you can spend time pointing out the problems and complain about them while you're still playing the game that's

an addictive game. Yeah, that's that's one that's got you. You know, they built something special, that's for sure. So I'm ready happy for that team. You know, they're a small team, a smaller type of developer. Um and I love those stories. I love to see um when small indie developers and and many medium sized publishers and developers have these breakout games. Because it's so hard, markets so

saturated right now, there's so many games out there. When when when the company can come out and kind of figure out the recipe and have that hit, you know, it really changes the company and it's it's an exciting time. So I'm really excited for the whole team at Blue Hole and and all the guys that are making this game. We don't have a partnership with them or anything. This is not an endorsement. It's just me being the gamer nerd that I am. I just love this stuff. I

can appreciate that. Thank you again so much. It's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you, Jonathan, appreciate it. Have a great weekend. Again. I have to thank Frank for taking the time to speak with me. He also met with me during E three and his passion for gaming was clear in both cases. And in a moment we're going to cover a few more odds and ends about alien Ware, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.

All Right, we're back now. I didn't talk about this with Mr Azor, but alien Where experienced a really big change in two thousand six. That's when the PC company Dell. Dude, you got a Dell. That Dell acquired alien Ware as

a wholly owned subsidiary of Dell Computers. Nelson Gonzalez issued an open letter explaining the move from alien Ware's perspective, and in that he said that Dell and alien Ware shared similar philosophies in the personal computer space, including the strategy to use direct, the direct business model with consumers, and he said that Dell would give alien Ware the assets to step up to the next level in gaming,

rig production, and shipping. You see, there were these huge markets of opportunity for the company, especially in areas like in Asia, but as a boutique PC manufacturing operation, they just didn't have the assets that would allow them to reach those markets. They didn't have the manpower, they didn't have the the hookups in the supply chain to be

able to step up manufacturing to the next level. For that, they needed something they needed to either grow exponentially, which was difficult considering their boutique PC status, or they needed a partner with an established, big company in the space, and that ended up being Dell, so uh. Gonzalez was quick also to point out that alien Ware wasn't going anywhere.

It was going to continue to exist as its own, separate brand from Dell, with its own dedicated product development, marketing, planning, and customer support departments, so it would effectively operate as a as a as A and a private entity within the confines of Dell. You know, from the outside, that's what it would look like. And he was very careful to say, you're not going to see a whole lot of changes here now. Nelson Gonzalez served as CEO for

alien Ware until two thousand seven. Today, Michael Dell is technically the CEO of the company because he's a founder and the CEO of Dell Technologies, and Franka Zora as the general manager. Over the years, the company has experimented a bit, both in case design and in new products.

In two thousand and fourteen, alien Ware announced its alpha Steam Machine, which was a small PC box system, one of those self contained PCs, very very compact, and you would just hook that up to your display and your keyboard and your mouse and it would take care of everything. Now, it ended up launching as a Windows eight gaming PC in a box instead of a Steam Machine, but that was due to delays in the Steam OS, the operating system from Valve, and that reminds me I need to

do an episode about Valve at some point. These days, alien Ware's also getting into peripherals. They are offering up some uh some accessories to PC games, like keyboards or a computer mouse, like a gaming mouse, that sort of thing, and to plays as well, so they have branched out beyond the gaming rings. This is not the first time that they've worked with various peripherals. But I can tell you they're really pretty. I got a chance to play with some when I was at E three, and uh

I liked them. They felt they felt great, and they look really nice, really snazzy. If I were a pro gamer, I'd probably be looking at those um although obviously I would want to make sure that they really stood the test of my leite skills, being the gamer that I am.

If you hand me a cutting edge machine and tell me to give you give you my thoughts on it, chances are I'm just gonna say it's real fast and pretty um, largely because my skills are not at a level where I can really push the hardware at a decent amount to to give you an idea of any

limitations I might encounter. I doubt that I would ever run into any limitations unless it were something along the lines of trying to run a particular pularly complicated game, like complicated in the sense of graphics intensive and process or intensive on a machine, in which case it's not really me that's testing the machine, it's the software. One thing I need to address before I get out of here is PC prices, because alien Ware rigs aren't and

never have been, cheap. They are expensive. It's an expensive, boutique customized gaming rig approach, and so you're you're spending a premium for that. There's a great article on tech Radar about alien Ware's history that includes a specific example that I think is helpful. Back in in the early days of alien Ware, remember the company that became alien where launched in nineties six well, that's when alien Ware

launched the first Area fifty one tower desktop PC. The price tag for one particular configuration of this PC was three thousand seven dollars, which if you had just for inflation, would be more than five thousand sixty dollars today, this particular configuration of the Area fifty one desktop. Keeping in mind, these rigs are customizable, so you could build it out with fewer bells and whistles and that would bring the price down. It was an impressive build at the time.

It included two Voodoo three D graphics cards and included a two D graphics card because remember the Voodoo three D graphics cards didn't handle two D rendering on their own. You had to pair it with another graphics cards. So I had three graphics cards total and dual sound cards which would allow for two different incompatible sound formats to work on the same machine. So that way, if you had a game that supported one but not the other, you were covered because it had both of those sound

cards in there. And it had a lot more to it as well. So it was a premium price to be sure, and it definitely would be less expand to build your own gaming rig from the ground up selecting

all the same components. So if you went out and bought the processors and the graphics cards and the sound cards, and the motherboard and the case and the power supply and the cooling system and all of that stuff, if you bought all of that yourself, you would not spend so much money as you would buying the Alien War rig.

But you also have to remember part of that price that you're paying for Alien Wear includes the labor of putting all that stuff together for you and making sure that the actual computer works before it is shipped to you, so you don't have that frustration of building out a rig, turning on the power and nothing happens, and then having to track down where is the issue. Is there something that's not plugged in correctly? Is there a bad component? All of that would be taking care for you, so

part of the price goes to that. Another big part of the price ends up covering the aesthetic appeal of Alien Wear. These are customized machines with uh with very cool cases, often with lighting effects and other elements that set it apart from other types of gaming rigs. So you then ask, all right, well is that worth that extra amount of money. This this really cool design that sets this apart from say a regular you know, tower desktop style, and if that's important to you, then that

extra money might be well warranted. The fact that all those decisions are taking care for you, the build is taking care for you, the the aesthetic is there if that appeals to you. Uh, and the granted today, as we alluded in the interview, the complications of figuring out what components go into your computer, those have been whittled

down significantly. You don't have to worry nearly as much today as you did back in the day where you had the different battling sound cards and video cards that that you you know that that we're dominating the space, and most of the games that were coming out would only support some but not all of them, which fractured the market. That's not as big an issue now, so you can take a lot of that confusion out, but still kind of a daunting process for a lot of

people to build their own PC. So yeah, alien ware rigs can get expensive, particularly if you want to build a beast of a machine. I do recommend that you go to the alien ware website and just you know, go nuts, just see what you could do if you went premium as far as you possibly could, because I guarantee you you're gonna get a rig that's gonna come in it around like ten grand. It's crazy, but it would also be amazing if you had that kind of

cheddar to drop on a on a PC. Personally, unless six certain numbers come up in the near future, I don't think I'll be able to justify buying the premium cream of the crop fastest that there is type of gaming rigs that are out there, but they these alien ware rigs that are built they also tend to perform really, really well against various benchmarks. They're not always at the top. Sometimes they're battling at the top with a couple of other gaming rigs, but they're always in contention so that

you get good performance as well. The question are they worth the price? That's the decision that every gamer has to make for him or herself. I can say honestly, I have never owned an alien ware rig, but I have built out a rig online more than once, and one of these days, I'm guessing I'm gonna pull the trigger on this because I really do like the aesthetic and I do like the idea of all of that work being taken care for me, so I don't have to sit down and do it all myself. But that's

because I have made that decision. I completely am aware that this is a premium style product, and then at that point I can finally play the latest PC games and then immediately starts soaking up bullets from all the other players, because a gaming Riggs performance depends pretty heavily on the skill of the gamer, and my skill is a I mean, I'm more than I'm older than forty guys. My twitch skills have been on the decline for a decade, and they weren't great to start with, but I still

enjoy playing well. I'm very glad that I got a chance to look into this particular company. It's one that I've seen around forever, and I've been a fan of their design for quite some time, but I never really

looked into it before. If you guys have any suggestions for types of companies I should do an episode on, or people I should interview, or really any topic in technology that you would like to learn more about, whether it's cutting edge, brand new technology or something from ancient history. And you've always wondered how did it work and and where did it go? Send me a message let me know what you want. My email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can always

drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook. The handle at both of those is text stuff hs W. Remember you can watch me record episodes live at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. I record on Wednesdays and Fridays, so if you want to watch an episode get recorded, including all the bits where I make little mistakes and flubs and I have to go back and fix it, then you should tune in on Wednesdays and Fridays. I also like to chat with the chat room and we have a good old time, so I'll see you then

and I'll talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com