The New Area-51 Brings More Than New Guts. It eats Blackbirds!

Yesterday, Alienware launched a new Area-51 desktop gaming rig with a whole new motherboard, graphics card, and DDR3 memory. Their homepage calls out "kicking the competition's teeth in since '98."

What I found particularly interesting for this launch was more than the usual. Their homepage banner shows their classic desktop being embraced by a creature from Crysis. If you look even c l o s e r, you can see the creature is holding what it appears to be a black bird.

This is obviously a jab at HP's Blackbird 002 gaming system. I wonder how many people have seen this thus far. I guess HP probably hasn't said a bleep or reacted to not give Alienware any more steam for this launch. HP has never really been a contender in the gaming market. Since their acquisition of VoodooPC they have made a good effort to compete in the gaming market but just how long will their investment continue to swim against the current? For such a large organism of a corporation it's funny to see how slow to market in keeping up with industry technology.

The heavier you machine is, the easier it sinks. It seems HP's acquisition of VoodooPC has made the symbiosis a 'heavier' competitor. I think HP should stick to competing with mainstream brands.

Kudos for Alienware for having some sort of creative competitiveness and keeping the industry interesting.