When I originally contacted Kelt Reeves about the possibility of him sitting down for an interview for me to post on my web page, I honestly didn't think I would receive a reply, or maybe just get a form letter in the mail regretting that he was unable to give interviews to "non-commercial" sites like mine. But instead, I received what must be described simply as an "enthusiastic" response from Mr. Reeves. He agreed immediately to the interview, answered all the questions posed to him, and seemed very happy to be asked at all. What follows are his responses, in no particular order, unedited.

-Vincent Vega _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

1. WHAT WAS YOUR INITIAL MOTIVATION FOR STARTING FALCON NORTHWEST COMPUTER SYSTEMS?

I was about to be unemployed.  Before I ever graduated from college as a pilot, I knew the aviation industry just didn't need any more people.  It was right after the Gulf War and the Air Force had cut their fighter wings in half.  All of those trained pilots were taking the few civilian jobs. It looked bleak for low-timers like myself.  So I figured if I didn't start my own job I wasn't going to have one.  Computers had always been my hobby, so I thought I'd go into business building them.

2. HOW DOES IT FEEL, AT AGE 27, TO BE THE PRESIDENT OF ONE OF THE MOST ACCLAIMED COMPUTER COMPANIES IN THE COUNTRY?

  >Grin<  I love the fact that my customers feel that way about the company, but we're not really known outside the gaming community.  I just find it refreshing when people have heard of my company at tradeshows now. It saves on introductions.  I try not to let our press get to us.  The day you start believing your own press you forget to keep working at it.  I try to stay focused on the fun new toys, and carefully reading our customer's comment cards.

3. WHAT IS YOUR BACKGROUND IN THE COMPUTER BUSINESS? WHAT DID YOU DO BEFORE YOU DECIDED TO START A COMPUTER COMPANY, AND WHAT KIND OF EXPERIENCE GIVES YOU THE ABILITY TO MAKE SUCH SMOKIN' MACHINES?

  My background is mainly goofing off.  I have been goofing off playing video games since I was about 9 years old.  In high school I wrote some really bad video games with my vast knowledge of BASIC, which prompted me to drop my programming goals and focus on seriously wasting time playing professionally written games.  In college I had no money, so instead of buying new hardware to keep my aging PC game-capable, I had to start digging into it and tweaking.  The rest as they say, is history.

4. WHAT WAS THE VERY FIRST COMPUTER THAT YOU OWNED?

  A Tandy TRS-80 model 1.  Affectionately referred to as the "Trash-80". It had no storage medium of any kind, and this was back in 1980 when video games came in books and you spent hours typing the code in yourself.  When you turned off the PC, the game was gone.

5. WHAT ARE THE UPS AND DOWNS OF OWNING A COMPUTER COMPANY?

  It's a cut-throat, razor-thin margin, relentlessly paced, stress-inducing, brutally competitve, blink and you're toast, never-ending rat race.  I love it!

6. WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO BESIDES RUN THE HOTTEST GAMES AT THE FASTEST FRAMERATES?

  I'm really into Home Theater.  Some of the next advancements you'll see in our PCs are my attempts at bringing that hobby into the PC world.  If "couch potato" is a hobby, I guess that's about it.  I also do karate several times a week so that I can work off the effects of playing too many video games.

7. HOW DO YOU CHOOSE THE COMPONENTS THAT GO INTO THE MACH V?

  That's a very loaded question.  First of all, the "MACH V" means many things to many people.  "MACH V" is a brand name for a custom built PC. Almost every single MACH V that ships is different from the last one depending on the customer's wishes.

How we choose the components that we offer is a long process.  Basically to offer a product it has to pass our standards for speed, reliability and compatability.  To become part of what we showcase to the reviews in our example MACH Vs - it has to be the absolute best in all three of these areas .  We also consider the intangibles like the manufacturer's history and how responsive their technical support is.  About the only thing we never care about is the price.  We're all about offering the best, and we always leave it up to the customer to decide what parts fit their budget.

We do exhaustive testing.  We read reviews.  We question reviews.  We beta test.  We play a lot of games on this stuff.  We are constantly flunking hardware for stuff the manufacturers never tested.  We just failed an Intel i740 card from a major manufacturer this week because Jedi Knight bogged down on that card when playing MIDI.  Frankly, to most people buying that card that's not a serious flaw.  For us, it means we won't carry it.

8. WHAT IS YOUR PERSONAL SET-UP?

  I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you. ;-P  Actually, it's CONSTANTLY changing.  My system is always a Frankenstein of beta test equipment and things we're trying out to see if we'd like to offer them. If I gave you the laundry list of what's in it it would be outdated before you even posted this.

9. OTHER THAN STARTING YOUR COMPANY, WHAT ELSE DO YOU REMEMBER ABOUT THE COMPUTER INDUSTRY THAT HAS CHANGED FOR BETTER OR WORSE BETWEEN 1992 AND THE PRESENT?

  You're makin' me feel old here!  The two best advances I've seen in products are the original SoundBlaster and the first 3Dfx Voodoo.  Those were the two groundbreaking products since VGA that have made Quantum leaps in making gaming on the PC more fun.  Everything else has been evolutionary: faster processors, more memory, more storage, bigger monitors, better sound, etc.

The only seriously adverse change in this industry is that the speed at which these changes are happening (Moore's Law) has accelerated to the point where good products can be antiquated simply by press releases of products to come.  A perfect example of this is the first Quantum Obsidian board.  It was released the same week as the Voodoo2 press release.  It was 100% faster than the next fastest board on the planet, but few people bought it because everyone wanted to wait for the coming Voodoo2.  It's gotten so bad that consumers no longer buy - they just sit and wait for the next best thing.  Few have realized there's always going to be a next best thing.

10. IS THERE ANYTHING AS FAR AS COMPONENTS GO ON THE HORIZON THAT IMPRESS YOU, AND THAT YOU MIGHT INCLUDE IN LATER VERSIONS OF THE MACH V?

  Always.  But to be honest, we are pessimists about new products.  We've seen the hype machines in action for so long.  There are very, very few products that live up to their hype.  We always wait until we actually get our hands on something and can beat it up before we'll consider it.

11. HOW DO YOU RESPOND TO PEOPLE WHO SAY THAT "I CAN BUILD A SYSTEM AS GOOD AND AS FAST AS A FALCON MYSELF FOR A CHEAPER PRICE."?

  Our sales guys hear that at least once a week!  After winning CGW's Ultimate Gaming Machine head-head three years in a row now, we're pretty confident in saying that if it was that easy, somebody would've taken us out by now.  Usually when most people start doing the math on the EXACT same components though, they'll find that we're very competitively priced. Just the case and motherboard we use cost three times more than "equivalents" do.  Most people only know the most basic specs to shop on though: "Pentium X with X gig hard drive and X size monitor".   We analogize that with saying "I want a car with a V-8 engine, 4 tires, and a steering wheel."  The quality, and price, differences are in the details. And even if I gave you every part to a Ferrari, you probably couldn't build the same car that the Ferrari enginners can.

12. FOR THE LAST FIVE YEARS OR SO, COMPUTER GAMING TECHNOLOGY HAS ADVANCED DRAMATICALLY. WHAT DO YOU SEE COMING IN THE FUTURE, AND HOW DOES FALCON FIT INTO THIS FUTURE?

  Our biggest new focus is going to be on sound.  We can now run 1024x768 games like "Unreal" at 60+ fps.  Things are looking really good on the video side.  A while back Gateway attempted to pull the PC into the living room with their "Destination" system.  Being a home theater (HT) nut, I know that the PC sounds nothing like a good HT system.  I can change that, but I don't believe dragging the PC out to your couch is a realistic solution.  I believe adding HT elements to the PC such as 5.1 channel sound and eventually DVD's Dolby Digital capability will greatly enhance the gaming experience.

13. RECENTLY THERE HAS BEEN A FLOOD OF SO-CALLED "GAMING COMPUTER" COMPANIES THAT HAVE COME UPON THE SCENE. ALIENWARE P.C. SEEMS TO HAVE WON THE BATTLE OVER OTHER COMPETITORS IN POPULARITY. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THAT COMPANY IN PARTICULAR, AND THE OTHER COMPANIES THAT CALL THEMSELVES "GAMING RIG MAKERS"?

We tried for years to get people to call our PC a "Gaming PC" in an era when the new thing was "Multimedia PC".  Now that gaming is considered a legitimate hobby everybody seems to have a "Gaming PC".  Despite Alienware's claims of having been making gaming PCs since 1992, they haven't even been around long enough to have been invited to CGWs annual head-head competiton.  From what I've seen of them they came out of the gate offering a "clone" of our system and practically a clone of our website.  Personally I find it annoying when I've spent six years of my life carving out a market niche and someone comes along and has a copy of it up and running in months.  But that's the business world - copy what works.  Zephyr did the same thing.  The NEC Power Player did the same thing.  Compaq tried.  Micron still pretends to try.  Zephyr's gone; the Power Player was cancelled; Compaq took their licks at UGM and left. Micron still heavily advertises in CGW but they never give us any trouble. You can't make a Gaming PC by adding a joystick and changing your marketing strategy - gamers are too smart for that.

14. DOES FALCON NORTHWEST WORK WITH, AND HAVE AN OPEN CHANNEL WITH THE SOFTWARE INDUSTRY?

  Definitely.  The reason we make these PCs is to play these games. Conversely, the software needs our power to run.  Lately we've started a series of co-op ads to drive home that point.  We've done ads with GT Interactive on Unreal,  Sierra Studios on Half-Life, and lately Bungie on Myth II: Soulblighter.  We've got more surprises to come too.  There are very few game companies that don't have at least one of our PCs in their offices they use for their demos.

15. WE'RE COMING UPON THE YEAR 2000, ARE YOU AND YOUR COMPANY READY FOR IT? HOW ABOUT THE MACH V'S THEMSELVES?

Ha!  Y2K is only going to affect very old PCs.  386's and mainframes. Unless you're running the Social Security system on your Falcon, don't give it another thought.

16. RECENTLY IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT YOUR COMPANY AND BOOT MAGAZINE HAS SOME BAD BLOOD BETWEEN THEM. THEIR LAST REVIEW OF A MACH V SAID IT WAS FRAUGHT WITH PROBLEMS, WHAT HAPPENED IN THAT REVIEW?

  Ok, those who have no interest in petty corporate bickering skip this one....Yes, boot and us have "issues".  Actually, had issues.  As of September boot is no more.  Imagine has spin-doctored it to make it sound like an improvement, but they're changing boot's name to "Maximum PC" and aquiring Home PC's subscriber base.  The fact is that no successful magazine changes its name and editorial.  They didn't get enough advertisers and made a lot of enemies, so boot was killed.

Anyway, I'll give you the quick version which is still too long:  Our first review with boot was in their first few issues.  Bryan del Rizzo gave us a 92% and gushed about the system.  Then editor Michael Brown slapped his "double take" on it - in which he totally disagreed with Bryan and even ragged on his own component choices: "the Altec Lansing ACS 500s are bootworthy, but they're at the bottom of my short list."  I don't know what that means, but it sounds really negative.  Later on they came up with "bootmarks" - their attempt at competing with Ziff Davis labs.  bootmarks are a collection of benchmarks from component manufacturers - in other words, not independent, unbiased, third party testing.   We ran some bootmarks on different systems and came up with wild results depending on what you ran it on.  We dug our grave with boot when they next requested a review system from us.  I told them that their bootmarks were flawed and until they came up with independent tests we wouldn't send them a review system.  This PO'd them greatly, and I knew it meant death in any future review.

In the December '97 issue of CGW we kicked butt at ZD labs with a $7,500 monstrosity that destroyed the competition in the benchmarks.  It won editor's choice.  We then passed the same system on to PC Gamer, who ran a few bootmarks on it and absolutely loved it.  Since PC Gamer and boot are in the same offices, the boot guys were interested.  Joel Durham, PC Gamer's then tech editor, asked me if it was okay if he passed the system on to boot.  It had already won at ZD labs, Gamer loved it - it was already there... I said why not.  boot's review was mediocre.  While Ziff Davis' benchmarks showed our 64 meg caching twin Cheetah RAID array at 4 times the speed of the second place finisher - bootmarks mysteriously put it at slower than an IDE drive.  I told them that their bootmark for drives was written by Adaptec and therefore doesn't work properly on non-Adaptec brand SCSI controllers.  Instead they decided to write up that we didn't know how to configure the RAID and even though they were able to drastically improve its performance through their superior tech skills, it still sucked.  We ended up with an overall boot rating of 8.  Never mind that (aside from the hard drive) we beat the Micron in the same issue on every single score. They gave the Micron a 9 and their "Kick Ass!" award.  We got faulted with negatives like "no multiplayer gamepads".

We've had plenty of other issues like our stance on overclocking (we won't because we warranty our systems), and recently we refused to send a system to Maximum PC to put up against the boot editor's overclocking project. Expect to see more negatives written about us in Maximum PC.  Already this answer is way too long winded.  I'll sum it up with this:  boot had a chip on their shoulder that they could build a faster PC than us.  Never mind that their job is to write a magazine and ours is to sell computers, they seemed to want to set themselves up as superior.  boot, Maximum PC, whatever - magazines are not our competition, and I don't believe they should try to be.

17. I'VE HEARD THERE'S A WAITING LIST TO WORK AT FALCON, WHAT IS YOUR CRITERIA FOR SELECTING THE EMPLOYEES AT YOUR COMPANY?

  That's somewhat true.  We're intentioanlly small and we don't have much employee turnover.  Just this morning we got a resume' from Texas for "any technical position".  In hiring, we look for nothing but intelligence, ability, and a love of hardware.  That's harder to find here than it sounds.  Often we have to get high-school wiz kids before they're out of school and start training them our way.  What we do can't be learned in school, so we look for the people who've torn apart their systems as a hobby.  Of course, if you don't play video games our only openings would be in accounting ;-)

18. WHAT GAMES ARE YOU AND THE STAFF AT FALCON PLAYING THESE DAYS?

  We all have different tastes, but the first person shooters are the ones we play together.  And we had a serious problem when Diablo was the rage.  We had our own room online where we'd play with employees and occasionally customers.  3am every morning and then in to work at 9.  It was bad.   Nowadays Unreal has my attention.  The shipping department still beats on each other at Quake 1 here after work (I can always tell when they've been using my PC at night because there's pizza grease on my mouse in the morning).  Might & Magic 6 has a life or two sucked away.  A little of everything really.  We have a company library with a couple hundred games in it that the employees can check out anytime.

19. CAN I HAVE A FREE FALCON IF I PUT THIS INTERVIEW ON MY WEB SITE? :)

  I warned you about the 20 questions because I only know 19 things....

20. IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE YOU'D LIKE TO ADD?

  I think I've been too long winded already!

THAT'S IT, EASY HUH?

Yep.  Good questions.  Thanks for your interest!

Thanks, Kelt.