With E-sports becoming more and more popular among young people, professional players are increasingly using cool-looking computers, to the degree that one young man from Nanjing has built an award-winning design studio to satisfy demand.
Wang Jiayu has been modifying computer cases as his career for 3 years now and is now in the top 3 doing such in China. His designs have won international competitions, while computer cases modified by Wang have even been used in the esports’ League of Legends’ championships.
According to Wang, he and his counterparts refer to modified computers as “MODs”, an abbreviation for “modification”. Although a modified computer costs a lot more than a regular model, they have still become very popular, with some esports players prepared to fork out tens of thousands of remninbi for modifications to the original computer that are tailor-made to their demand.
Among all of his designs, Wang’s favourite is a computer case that resembles a car engine. Not any old car, mind you, but the iconic brand closely-related to the 007-movie legend, Aston Martin. Wang even painted the computer case with auto paint; dark blue, with a metallic sheen. While the design for now remains a prototype, it will be later displayed at Aston Martin’s exhibition.
Wang only gained access to computers in 2002; getting his own when he was in junior high school. While he often read magazines such as《大众软件》(PopSoft), he gave up such hobbies after he went to high school and went on to major in photography in university.
It was only after he discovered that he and his friends all liked modifying computers that Wang founded the design studio with them together.
Fame, in the industry at least, was to come in 2016, when the team modified a computer for Intel to be used in their showcase at China Joy (China Digital Entertainment Expo & Conference), with a design that quickly became the talk of the town.
