A gaming historian talked to us about the last 2 decades of the industry. Here's what he's seen change.

• Over the last two decades, gaming has changed a great deal — and so has the industry's reputation.
• Listening to gamers has always been a crucial part of product development for the team at Dell.
• A gaming historian talks us through the lighter, cooler machines that are now being released.

When 43-year-old Cuban-born marketer Eddy Goyanes first started selling Alienware gaming computers in 2004, he would personally call every customer and ask them to mail him their video games. Back then, there was a 30-day wait for the then-small, private company's latest bit of kit, the Area-51 ALX, so the team would install customers' games for them, ensuring the desktop was ready to go as soon as it arrived with the customer.

Today, in the era of near-instant digital downloading, popping your games in the post seems laughably archaic. Over the course of the last two decades, Goyanes has grown up alongside Alienware's tech. He joined the company as a university student pursuing an engineering degree — the computers he sold back then were the first to have liquid cooling built in. Now, the machines he works with have industry-first fan structures and encapsulated liquid metals that enable the remarkably thin Alien X Series laptops to keep cool.

Alienware was founded by two childhood friends in 1996, and a decade later, its reputation for award-winning, customer-first gaming PCs was so strong that it was acquired by Dell.

From the beginning, said Goyanes — an official Alienware brand historian — "our founders were gamers" who "took insights from gamers very, very seriously."

Yet when Goyanes began working for Alienware, social media was in its infancy. It wasn't always easy to find out what gamers were thinking, hence the phone calls. Today, the company's own community forum, the Alienware Arena, has over ten million users. "Listening to what gamers are saying, what they want, is important, and that's how we thrive," Goyanes said. 

Gaming is better known as a social hobby

It's not just social media that's changed: The gaming community and public perceptions of gamers have also evolved dramatically. "There are stereotypes about gamers being isolated and living in a basement somewhere. All of that's not really true," Goyanes said. Back in the early 2000s, senators were pushing for regulations on the sales of video games to minors, and scientists were fighting to debunk myths linking video games and violence. Today, most of us are aware that gaming is a social hobby.

"We've seen a huge increase in gamers that create," Goyanes said. Now ordinary people can build huge online communities and make money by filming themselves playing games. Goyanes said that there are also gamers who love to be competitive and follow esports religiously. But mostly, he stresses, gamers today are a diverse community. "There's a whole range of gamers that span different age groups, different ethnic groups, different sexes," he said.

A documented history of firsts

What is the culmination of all this growth and Alienware's 30 years of learning and development? Goyanes said it's the company's latest premium laptop, the Alienware x16: "It's the incredible lighting, it's the full metal chassis, the six-speaker sound, and then 17-inch gaming performance in a 16-inch laptop." The machine, which retails from a £3,499 starting price in the UK, is equipped with the latest Intel® Core™ Processors and is the first and only 16" laptop in the industry with four fans inside, a (nearly) patented design that allows maximum thinness without sacrificing graphics performance. The Alienware x16 also has exclusive stadium lighting with 100 customizable micro LEDs on its back that can be animated with rainbow wave, scanner, and loop styles.

"What you can do with lighting, I think it's certainly the best thing we've ever released on a gaming laptop in our entire history," Goyanes said. Even the touchpad's lighting can be animated. Thanks to this emphasis on aesthetic engineering, the laptop is even desirable for non-gamers: Its "Lunar Silver" body is made of premium metals such as magnesium alloy, anodized aluminum, and stainless steel — Goyanes said these keep it sturdy and structurally rigid. "Our designs have always been something that our users have loved because they've always stood out, they've always been unique," he said.

As impressive as they might sound, patented features are par for the course for Alienware. "We have a history of firsts," Goyanes said. "We were the first to have a user interface, known as AlienFX, that allowed you to customize each lighting zone. Today, RGB lighting is available in almost every gaming system."

"Through our product line, we've always tried to change and adapt to what people needed," Goyanes said. "We've always tried to challenge the status quo and tried to do something different." Believe it or not, nowhere is this better demonstrated than the x16's hinges.

You might think there's just one way that hinges work and that it's been the same for hundreds of years. But the x16 has hinges that can actually slide forwards and backward, allowing the team to make the laptop thinner and more powerful. The hinge design is completely unique in the industry.

It is striking, Goyanes said, to compare the x16 to the "thick and heavy and louder" stuff he sold decades ago. But while social media and the gaming community have also evolved, not everything is different.

The Alienware team have been and will always be gamers; they play games to blow off steam after work, and Goyanes' colleague recently helped him level up on a particularly tricky game. "Gaming brings people together," he said. That's one thing that hasn't changed in all of his years in the industry and is very unlikely to change in years to come.

Learn more about the new Alienware x16 Gaming Laptop. 

This article was created by Insider Studios with Dell.