CONTROL FREAKS

Celebrating the MODDED PERIPHERALS from creators who see gaming differently

- Phil Iwaniuk

There are two ways to look at hardware, really. One is to scan the horizon for consumer products that best suit our needs and aesthetic sensibilities, and then assemble them, swapping parts in and out as your tastes change and product specs move on. That consumer behavior profile is the bedrock that the industry built itself on, but culturally, there's perhaps an even deeper foundation: making it all yourself.

The origins of PC modding, whether you're talking about cases, peripherals or aesthetic adornments like modern RGB lighting strips, harks back to a time when computing hardware was made with productivity in mind. A time before there was a gaming sector, before marketers realized they could sell us dedicated gaming versions of everything we used to interact with games.

It's inherent to the PC's nature. It's modular. You can mix and match parts, in a way that no other electronic equipment allows. As far back as 1965, an electronic engineer named James Sutherland (no relation to Silent Hill 2's James Sunderland) reportedly home-built a PC using surplus parts sourced from his job at Westinghouse.

That practice gradually became more popular over the decades, and as PC enthusiasts became better-versed in building PCs, they began looking for ways to modify and improve them. Long story short: somehow we went from people cutting holes in the sides of their PC with an angle grinder to aid CPU cooling to custom-painted controllers with Nier: Automata characters on them.