![]() ![]() Kelt: We’re into our 24th year now, and are both very different and very much the same as our roots. What are your major product lines, how do you market your products today, how many people work at Falcon Northwest today and how many systems do you sell in a year? So I took over his customer base, learned a lot about system building from him, and Falcon skyrocketed to three employees.ĭFC: Please give us the big picture look at the company today. He’d spent four years running a business building PCs for CAD/CAM users. The biggest leap early on was when my parents purchased a building that the owner was selling because he had some serious health issues. Kelt: At the start it was just me in the 6’ x 12’ office, and I mainly worked nights and weekends as I was still finishing up my degree. PC Gamer called Falcon Northwest “the company that created the gaming PC.” We weren’t the first to use a PC to game of course, but we were the first company to build and market a PC specifically designed for gaming.ĭFC: What did Falcon Northwest look like in the early days? How many staffers worked there, how did you market and how many systems did you build in a year? And that’s where we got our running start. So for many years, no one else thought PCs built for gaming was a worthwhile market. We were cutting trail with a machete in those early years, and even our customers were often reluctant to admit that they spent so much time playing on this expensive hardware. That seems almost silly now, but we advertised in CGW for four years before our first competitor even put a toe in the water. I’d read CGW for years, and the single best idea I ever had was noticing that no one had ever advertised a PC in COMPUTER Gaming World. There was only one significant publication (remember this is pre-internet) dedicated to gaming on PCs called Computer Gaming World and it was probably less than 100,000 in circulation. Yes, people played games on PCs, but it was a bit of an underground hobby. PCs were thought of as expensive tools for businesses, the exact opposite of an Atari or Nintendo. Kelt: The early 1990’s was a different time that’s a bit hard to imagine now, even for me. What did it take to get the message across on your original Mach V model so that Falcon Northwest rose above as a high-end boutique gaming system provider? But I can say I’ve sold PCs door to door, which is another “you kids have it easy” story I can annoy my salespeople with.ĭFC: Then as now, there have always been garage builders putting together PCs. I actually went door to door to sign makers trying to convince them that they could use these new-fangled computers to create and cut the vinyl letters for signs that they were cutting by hand at the time. I advertised in the school newspaper, and tried to get some business-focused clients too. I was hoping to sell them to my fellow students for the things we all wanted to do: play flight simulators and other games, and of course getting a little schoolwork done. ![]() I figured if I didn’t create my own job I wasn’t going to have one, so I borrowed some money from my parents and set up in a 6’ x 12’ office and built PCs. I was nearing graduation from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, but no one needed pilots back then. So I can totally annoy my children with the, “you kids have it so easy with your ‘pre-coded’ games” speech.ĬLICK BRIEF ICON to register to get our latest Complimentary Briefīy 1992, the years of goofing off with games and PCs proved very useful. It was a lot of work for pitiful “games” that made Pong look like Crysis in comparison. Back then you had to code games in yourself out of a book using DOS. I of course just wanted to use it to play. Kelt: I got my real start in computing at eight years old when my family got a TRS-80 Model 1 for my dad’s work. What was your business model back then and how did you go about getting customers in the beginning. In contrast, one small custom builder, Falcon Northwest Computer Systems in Medford, Oregon, has been successful when other firms have not since the mid-1990s.Īs the core market continues to expand, DFC sought to get an in-the-trenches look at where the high-end game PC business is today with the assistance of Kelt Reeves, founder and chief executive at Falcon Northwest.ĭFC: Is it true you got your start building flight sim desktops for fellow students back in college? How did that all come about? Tell us how you got Falcon Northwest off the ground in 1992. Many large computer makers have sought to feed this market with high-end systems… with mixed results, however. ![]() For the most part these core computer game consumers often invest in powerful updated components and hardware systems, with many of them building their own high-end PCs from the ground up. For several years now DFC Intelligence has been examining the positive impact of core gamers on the game industry in general, and the PC game segment in particular. ![]()
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