VoodooPC

» see voodoopc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Rahul Sood founded Voodoo Computers in Calgary in 1991 and built it into the luxury end of the enthusiast PC market. His brother Ravi joined the board in 1999. Before the sale the whole operation was about forty people, split between the Canadian headquarters and a web development office in Bangalore, which is a small company for the prices it was charging.

HP acquired it in September 2006 for an undisclosed amount, announced by Sood on his own blog on the 28th, with The Register writing it up the following day. Sood became chief technology officer of HP's Global Voodoo Business Unit. The first visible result was the HP Blackbird 002 in August 2007, a gaming desktop with a VoodooDNA label inside the case, which went on sale that 15 September.

On 10 June 2008 the redesigned Omen appeared, a brushed metal case with a seven inch auxiliary screen bolted to it, priced from $6,500 up to $20,000. That same year HP wound up the Voodoo business unit and Voodoo Computers Inc. stopped existing as a separate entity. The brand kept turning up on HP products after that, and the fade is why the date of death is hard to pin.

~ the case file ~

~ what six thousand dollars bought ~

Voodoo sold desktops with names like Rage and Hexx, cooled by liquid loops developed with CoolIT Systems in the same city and finished in paint that belonged on a motorcycle. The machines were assembled slowly and photographed well. You bought one for the same reason people buy watches that keep worse time than a phone.

In the Turkish forums I was reading then, frmtr and donanimhaber, everybody carried their hardware list in their signature. Mine was a list of parts bought one at a time as they became affordable. A Voodoo never showed up in anybody's signature, because it was not a thing you could own in that world. It was the machine quoted in the thread about what you would build if money stopped being part of the question, and the price was half the point of posting the link.

~ death by absorption ~

There was no shutdown. In September 2009 HP launched the Envy 13, its premium ultraportable, and Engadget noticed on the 14th that the Voodoo DNA branding was missing from it. Three days later Gizmodo read Sood's latest blog post and declared the brand basically dead.

What Sood actually wrote was that many people had assumed Voodoo designed those notebooks when in reality they had not, that Voodoo had been transitioning from desktop and notebook manufacturing to something beyond, and then: "Does this mean you'll never see a Voodoo or VoodooDNA desktop or notebook again? Hardly, I'm sure you will." Gizmodo called that a guess rather than a confirmation, stated in the tone of a man who had very clearly moved on. It was the last public word anybody got about the brand. Sood left HP in November 2010.

~ the logo outlived the name ~

Omen was a Voodoo product before it was anything else, the 2008 flagship with the second screen. HP brought the name back in 2014 on a thin gaming laptop and extended it to desktops and monitors two years after that. The Voodoo logo rode along on it until a redesign in 2020. The company HP bought was gone by 2009 and its best product name is still on shelves in 2026, attached to machines built to a completely different brief.

The domain is the last thing left and it does not belong to the story any more. voodoopc.com answers today by sending you to maingear.com, a boutique gaming PC builder founded by other people, so the final asset of a company that sold twenty thousand dollar desktops now works as a competitor's front door.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »