Inside the Home of Chrome

Fancy a foursome?

With the evening's festivities largely over, we sat down with master engraver and modder extraordinaire Micke "GoTaLL" Gustafsson to talk about the four custom cases he made for the house.



Right from the start, Micke was a natural choice for creating four themed computers for the Home. He not only has the talent, but he lives only an hour's drive from the house itself. Micke has carved (excuse the pun) a niche for himself in high-end engraving case mods through projects like Spiderman and Project AvP. At Dreamhack Winter 2005 punters kept him busy for four days straight, engraving side panels, mouse pads and even USB hard drive cases to order.

Unfortunately, projects like the Home of Chrome commission rarely run smoothly. You try and build in as much buffer time as you can but there are often unpredictable delays with receiving design approval and assembling all the necessary components . After all the planning, Micke had just ten days to create four unique cases and install / configure the hardware components. We know from first-hand experience that the guy works like a demon, but even this project pushed him, working from sun-up to well after midnight some days.



There's nothing like the smell of, err, aluminium in the morning. These are Micke's blank canvases: four black Cooler Master Cavalier aluminium cases.

"I decided to work on the Cavaliers," Micke told us, "for two reasons: it's a sweet case, but also unlike cheap aluminium cases, the Cavalier uses much thicker metal. The girls need high quality cases that will last them, not some cheap 1mm alu crap. The other thing I like about the Cavalier is the anodising - it produces a really hard finish which is great to engrave on. Believe it or not, the surface hardness varies from case to case and the Cavalier has that extra hardness." Hey man, you're the expert, so we'll take your word for it.

Design Inspiration

From Day One, Quake 4 was the theme - it's the game of choice for the girls. The challenge was to figure out a design that looked cool but was also achieveable in the tight timeframe.

"I looked at dozens of screenshots to look for ideas, and researched the characters, different maps etc. The secondary challenge for me was the fact that the brief called for four 'identical cases' which still expressed some individual flair for each girl. In the end, we focussed on the game's weapons and four cases / four weapons made the most sense."


Luckily it wasn't too hard to find screenshots of the weapon models and even better, they were taken from the side-on viewpoint. Clockwise from bottom left, we have the Blaster, Railgun, Rocket Launcher and Shotgun.

Weapon engraving

Micke uses a particular technique when he engraves for a project like this, one we have documented well before. Simply take the source art, enlarge it to the appropriate size and print it out. Secure to the material using tape and use the printout as a guide to trace the basic lines. The process is destructive and the key to success is to preserve the paper template for as long as possible as you engrave through it. With practice, Micke tells us you either "learn how to keep it together or do the important things before it falls apart."

His aim was to convey the overall design of each weapon without engineering things. The real skill to a quality engraving is as much knowing what areas to leave out as much as it is what lines to draw.