- Take a look at these PCs.
Now, without me saying anything, you know what they're for:
gaming.
I mean, what gave it away?
Was it the color?
The sharp edges?
The metal pipes?
No, it was the lights, right?
For 25 years, manufacturers have been designing
very specific hardware for gamers.
But in the last few years, we started to see a shift.
And as gaming becomes more and more popular,
some gaming gear is being designed for a broader appeal.
Instead of PCs that scream, "I'm a gamer!",
these new machines look like they're for someone
a little more adult.
But how did we get that original gamer
aesthetic to begin with?
And with this big cultural shift,
what's the future of gaming hardware gonna look like?
- The personal computer first kind of came,
became an object in the consumer marketplace,
let's say, beginning in the late 70s.
But really, picking up steam in the early 80s.
There was a lot of people,
didn't know what this thing was for.
If you think about the ways
that people imagined computers prior to that,
it was huge mainframes that took up giant rooms.
It was things like 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The idea was that computers
had always seemed foreign and exclusionary.
- This is Laine Nooney,
a professor of Media Studies at NYU,
who's working on a book about early video game history.
And according to her, you can't talk about the
gamer aesthetic without talking about the computer history,
right at its point of inception.
- There was a lot of effort
put into the industrial design of these machines
to figure out how to get the personal computer
to look like something that belonged in the home,
so you get that, that kind of moment of beige plastic.
- The earliest personal computers and gaming consoles
really tried to fit into your home and look like other
appliances, so people would feel comfortable.
I mean, look at this Atari 2600 from 1982.
For a lot of people,
the first home computer wasn't a personal computer.
It was a console just like this.
It's kinda scary.
It's got all these weird switches
and this big port in the front for the cartridge.
And then all these extra ports on the back
for the controllers.
This is kind of intimidating,
made a little less intimidating by the wood paneling,
and this need to be friendly
wasn't just limited to the '80s.
For two decades,
manufacturers tried to make PCs look innocuous and nice.
By this point, computers were really starting to be
adopted into homes.
Finally.
But they all looked like this.
Boring.
Even at the turn of the century,
computers made people nervous.
Like, think about your parents or grandparents
and how they feel about Alexa.
It's the same thing.
- What the hell is wrong with this blasted thing?
Amanda!
(people laughing)
- Soft, smooth, plastic-y design.
These mainstream PCs at the time
were designed to blend seamlessly into your home.
And this design language is reflected
in the Super Nintendo from the early 90s.
The SNES was seeking out the same people
who wanted to buy a MAC and IBM clones.
But other gaming companies weren't just trying to play dead.
(upbeat guitar)
- If you think about the industrial design differences
between the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis,
the Super Nintendo is a toy.
And Nintendo knew that,
and they marketed to that demographic
of kind of eight to twelve-year-old boys.
Sega went for a slightly older male demographic.
They were trying to market to teenagers.
And if you think about that black, slick, curved console,
right, it looks like a mix of something
from Star Trek meets Aliens, right?
- Sega!
- All of the design of it is meant to be aggressive.
It's meant to be different.
And I think that's where we begin to pick up
that kind of black plastic aesthetic.
That mode of marketing becomes very effective
in getting people to tie, in particularly young men,
to tie certain aesthetic decisions
to their concept of what it means to be a gamer.
- This thing feels dangerous, and different.
And while the console giants may have figured out
what their brand looked like,
the PC companies were taking a different path.
Gamers started building their own rigs,
and some smart companies soon joined them.
To get a better understanding of that history,
I spoke with Chris Garcia.
He's been a curator at The Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, California, for the last 20 years.
- We start seeing companies making gaming-focused
rigs in the early 90s.
There were several.
And there were actually, you could find them advertised
in the back of all the magazines.
But then, you know,
you've got a couple of significant ones in the mid 90s,
that really changed everything.
The biggest one is Alienware, of course.
- This brings us to Frank Azor.
He's worked at Alienware almost since its creation in 1996.
He started out boxing up PCs in the store room
and now he's a Vice President at Dell,
which bought the company in 2006.
- Trying to remember PCs 20 or so years ago,
everybody was really focused on reducing the cost
because computers were very expensive at the time.
We came in with an approach that said, "Hey, um, these
things are kind of ugly.
And everybody is like pulling features out and pulling
technology and performance out.
What if we did the complete opposite?
What if we put the best performance into this thing?"
And we actually made it look really, really cool.
- Forget SEGA coming for Nintendo, Alienware took on
the entire PC industry up until that point.
I mean, look at this compact.
And now look at this.
The Alienware Area-51.
This thing is cool as hell!
And like the SEGA,
it's also a little aggressive and scary looking.
- Alienware
makes computers
that look like Alienware computers.
What's really nice about what they have done,
is they have given an experience of their gaming
that is not just the ability to deeply interact
with the game, it's the ability to deeply interact with
a device that is a definition of them as a gamer.
- Alienware introduced its first really
alien-looking computers in 2002 with the Area-51 M laptop.
In 2003, the Area-51 Predator 1 desktop.
In two years, it forced the industry and consumers
to reconsider, not just the desktop, which had a big
community of gamers building their own wild PCs at home,
but laptops, which until that point were either
brutally average or Apple.
In over the decade, others followed.
Not just other companies, who were bought by bigger
companies, and now live on as branding for corporations like
HP and Asus, but even people at home building their
own PCs.
People building these things, including me, were nerds.
When we weren't playing video games, we were watching movies
with pretty similar plots.
You know, space age, guns, ships and aliens, or disaffected
computer lovers yearning for something more.
- Tron had a massive effect.
Because as we're seeing the generation that were buying
PCs for their own in the early 90s,
they were kids when we got Tron.
They were, they had this idea that "Oh, the future has
bright string lights."
- Things like how, right.
With the lights, right.
Star Trek is an obvious obvious case.
- Tron's absolutely been an inspiration for our industrial
design.
We actually internally refer to it as Tron lighting.
- Tron lighting is not just about loving the movie Tron.
It's about the very core of this gamer setting.
Setting yourself apart.
Custom paint job or a line of piping is expensive.
A couple of customizable LED strips are cheap,
which is nice because an inexpensive LED strip makes
each gamer an individual.
Their computer, like them, is special.
Also loud, big, and intimidating for anyone who isn't
just like you:
a gamer.
So what happens if you like playing games and don't want
your computer looking like a spaceship?
- When Razer came into the gaming space,
I think there was already a gaming aesthetic out there,
but it was of the one that we found that was matching
what we wanted, we were expecting.
From the beginning, from purely from a design language
to speak to you.
We wanted something a little more, um, minimal?
- Stephane Blanchard is the Director of Design
at Razer and he's been there since 2006,
a year after the company started,
when it was just making neat little peripherals.
A big reason Razer stands apart from other gamer brands
is because of him,
which means he was also there when the Razer Blade laptop
was introduced in 2011,
nine years after Alienware first
made those wild looking gaming laptops.
- When we started going to the laptop business,
there was already big brands like Alienware.
They were doing these very thick and powerful products
and we found that it was not what we wanted.
We wanted very thin but powerful.
Everybody looked at us as like we are crazy.
You have no idea what you are talking about.
- So compare the Razer Blade -
Even the one in 2011, to any of the Alienware laptops.
They're pretty different, right?
The Razer's pretty laid back and nothing like previous
gaming laptops.
There's no giant loud fans or exhausts.
No wild colors.
Even the lights are subtle and toned down.
It's thin, relatively light.
It's sacrificing just a little power
for more approachability.
Universally.
And with this new design language implemented by Razer
and its laptops, we witnessed another transition.
Gaming devices that were designed for the masses.
- I mean I think one of the things that we're learning
from the bump in PC gaming that's been happening,
certainly something everyone has been paying attention to
with the rise of mobile, is that gaming is more diverse,
it's more plural.
There's a much bigger audience for it than I think a lot of
these companies were necessarily considering.
Everyone is sort of becoming aware that gaming is,
the majority of the population does it.
It's done across both genders.
And for a lot of people, it might be perceived as a hobby
or there's not necessarily this interest in that being the
primary motive identification.
- Over 150 million Americans play games, but not every one
of those people ascribe to the gamer identity.
If people aren't ascribing to that gamer identity,
then the companies that cater to that identity need to step
up and start making stuff for all those other people.
Razer's willingness to sacrifice power for portability
caught on at the right time.
In 2011, laptop sales were at an all-time high.
People wanted advice on the go.
Companies noticed.
In particular, Nvidia, which makes the graphics cards
in nearly every single gaming laptop.
A few years ago, Nvidia realized it could push
design forward, forcing laptop makers to consider thinner
and more portable devices, Max-Q Design.
Rather than me explaining it, here's Mark Aevermann,
Director of Product Management in Nvidia.
- What Max-Q is trying to solve is really the fundamental
observation that gamers are people and gamers want to be
able to of course game on their laptop and have a
fantastic gaming experience, but they also want a device
that they can take with them for any of their needs.
There's a ton of gamers out there who want a device
that's both powerful and portable.
So Max-Q is about solving that challenge.
- Nvidia put Max-Q out there to make these laptops smaller,
more portable, and friendly.
The idea is Nvidia provides laptop makers with advice and
guidelines as well as specifically designed graphics cards
to make thinner laptops that will sacrifice a little power
that most people won't miss, in order to improve
battery life, thermal demands, and just general portability.
Not quite the 80s beige box, but something a little more
approachable than this monster from Origin.
This guy is about power, customization, identity.
Max-Q Design is about coffeehouse appeal.
But making a laptop that can move nimbly from a round of
Apex Legends to a quick PowerPoint presentation
without awkward conversations about being a gamer,
isn't as easy as it sounds.
- Laptops, gaming laptops in particular, are one of the most
complex design challenges in modern computing.
If you think about it, gaming laptop has to balance
a ton of factors:
It has to balance weight constraints, thermal constraints,
noise constraints, performance constraints, and notably
cost constraints.
- So let me break this down for you on how hard it is to
engineer a gaming laptop.
Let's say you have a gaming laptop and you
want it to run faster.
Well, that means it's going to get hotter,
which means you're gonna need more fans,
which means the fans are going to get louder,
which means you can't sit on your couch, watching TV
while playing with the laptop because it's going to be
too loud,
which means, okay, let's make it thicker so that we can allow
more air in.
Oh no, now it's way too big.
That's complicated.
- We saw an explosion in gaming laptops somewhere around
5, 6 years ago.
Kind of why that is, fundamentally boils down into
you know, from my perspective, really the GPU itself
got much more efficient.
- With graphic cards becoming more efficient,
Max-Q Design being adopted by the flashier laptop makers
like Alienware and Origin, things are starting to shift.
Gaming laptops are getting thinner and more approachable.
They're willing to sacrifice power and flash for broader
appeal, which means we're going to see a lot more devices
like this pink Razer Blade Stealth.
Which fits a decent enough graphics card inside something as
thin as a MacBook Pro.
And a lot fewer
of the beasts
like the Alienware Area-51 M.
Gaming laptops are probably going to start looking like
every other laptop.
And I mean, except for the lighting.
Even people who don't call themselves gamers
can love some flashy lighting.
(electronic music)