Housed in what was once a posh department store in the heart of downtown San Francisco, you'll find Razer's systems product group — the team responsible for the company's growing range of PC products, including 2011's Blade gaming laptop . Made up of designers, engineers, and software developers, the team designs each product from the ground up, beginning with rough sketches and the smallest inklings of an idea all the way up to the polished devices that ship to consumers. This month, the group will launch the Edge , the company's very first tablet but also the first gaming-centric Windows 8 tablet to hit the market, powerful enough to run full PC games like Crysis 3 or Tomb Raider. To learn more about how Razer brought the Edge to life, we visited the systems product group for an exclusive look at the development process and earliest manifestations of the upcoming tablet.

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“ [Project Fiona] was like a concept car.

“ We don’t design things to look cool, we design things to make sense.

Before the Edge, there was Project Fiona . Introduced at CES 2012, Project Fiona was a concept tablet PC flanked by two side-mounted controllers, almost like a Wii U Gamepad on steroids. Fiona was met with enthusiasm from the press and fans, and while the company clearly stated its intentions to bring it to market, it was clearly rough around the edges. What some may find surprising, however, was that it was the product of only months of development, borne from hand-carved foam models and an ambition to design the world's first gaming tablet.In preparation for our visit, Razer excavated many of these early examples, filling two large tables to showcase how rapidly evolved. It began with sketches and hand-made ergonomic prototypes from 2011 forged by the group's designers and engineers with direction from Razer's CEO Min-Liang Tan. The goal was to create a tablet that maintained the portability of a tablet, but offered the precision of integrated controllers. To hone the concept, the team called upon even the most rudimentary of models, even cardboard panels bonded by painters tape or foam cutouts with fishing weights attached. Primitive as it may sound, each helped establish the vision for the device, setting guidelines for its overall weight and dimensions. It also allowed the company to quickly investigate some concepts before settling on Fiona's side-mounted controllers. At one point, Razer considered fold-out handles and controllers that magnetically slid out from the base of the tablet, but given the impact on weight and thickness, were eventually nixed."[Project Fiona] was like a concept car," senior industrial designer Francois Laine told IGN. "We noticed that [people at CES] started to say that it was weird — that it was nice — but a bit weird to have handles permanently attached to it. So we started thinking about this idea about how we make it modular and being able to snap different accessories on the tablet."In order to make the concept modular, Razer risked losing the rigidity and durability of the side-mounted controllers. To get around the issue, Razer called upon custom-tooled aluminum framing, which would serve as the base of the Edge and the gamepad attachment and lock together. While the solution would add some bulk, it would give the Edge the look and feel like one unified product. Solving the same problem with the Edge's keyboard dock was not so simple, and even now as the launch approaches, the company is still refining it. Amongst the spread of rough mock-ups, Razer had placed some seemingly near-final versions of the keyboard dock that had actually been scrapped.“We always evaluate how easy it is to use, we want something that is obvious, and if it's not obvious, we kill it," Laine said. "We’re in a time when people expect really good quality for their products, and the consumer doesn’t know how difficult it is to design those things. But they expect perfection. To make it feel natural and obvious. So we work hard to make things obvious."But the struggles of making the Edge modular paled in comparison to designing the tablet itself. Packing the powerful components of a full-sized gaming laptop into a tablet form factor would be a feat of engineering and design. The company would have to find a way to provide enough ventilation for the Edge's powerful graphics processor and ensure the heat it gave off didn't negatively impact other components. Many of the issues were solved internally, but the company sought out the help from hardware partners like Intel to custom-tailor solutions to their needs.The team also had to strike a balance of performance, battery life, and portability. The subject was in constant debate, but the company also gathered feedback from its fans as part of its much-touted crowdsourcing campaign."We investigated what would give us the thinnest and lightest product and what would give us the most powerful product — and there are design trade-offs we had to make," John Wilson, Razer's VP of engineering explains. "There is a weight concern, there's a thickness concern and with the help from the fans, we realized there was a middle ground.""We don’t design things to look cool," Laine explained. "We design things to make sense for the user. All you see is based around constraints and making it work."In addition to its own established goals, Razer also had to adhere to licensing guidelines set by Microsoft, which dictated everything from the type and number of buttons it could use to the minimum thickness of the bezel. The frame around the screen, we'd learn, could not be thinner than a certain measurement.Although Razer is proud of the end result, it's already looking at ways it can improve in the future. Wilson says that the company is constantly researching technology that will be available within the next two years and would allow the company to make its products thinner, lighter, and more powerful. It's also keeping a close eye on other platforms, like Android."We're starting to see new titles that are really starting to push the limits of [Android] hardware," Wilson said. "Combine that with streaming services, and other approaches to get content onto your product, it's kind of an exciting prospect."So, what's next for the systems product group? Unsurprisingly, the team couldn't say and all evidence was carefully hidden from our prying eyes, but Wilson promises big things are coming. Could it be a new Blade laptop or a new category entirely? We'll have to wait and see.Be sure to check back on Thursday, March 28th at 8am PST for our comprehensive review of the Razer Edge.

Scott Lowe is IGN's resident tech expert and Executive Editor of IGN Tech. You can follow him on Twitter at @ScottLowe and on MyIGN at Scott-IGN