For as long as there have been PCs, there have been PC gamers. In 1996, Sakai of Miami--named after a Japanese warrior--began rethinking how to market its home computers. "The premise was that we could sell gaming PCs, that we could target people like us who were gamers," recalls company cofounder Nelson Gonzalez. In 1997 the company renamed itself Alienware ("I was really into The X-Files and aliens back then, and I was into computer hardware," he says) and launched its first gaming machine, The Blade, with a 3D video graphics card.
In 1998 that model evolved into the Area-51 (an Intel machine; its AMD counterpart, the Aurora, came out a year later). It was amped up with gaming hardware, including three video cards (one 2D card, plus two 3D add-on cards with 3Dfx's Voodoo chip) and two sound cards (a Sound Blaster 16 for older games and a newer Diamond Monster Sound card, which took advantage of DirectX-capable features like 3D positioning). Back then a high-end system set you back $3799.