It’s official, folks. High-end gaming PC and smartphone maker Razer is getting a new product line: toasters.
Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan has confirmed in a Facebook post that the company will make the appliance that fans have been asking for since 2013.
It’s been a long genesis since then. It all started when a Razer fan called Mark Withers created a Facebook page titled “Give us the Razer Toaster”. Tan answered his announcement post with a simple challenge: “You get a million likes on your page and I’ll mak you a f*ckn’ Razer toaster.”
In the next two years, people started to slowly join in. The community of the Razer Toaster was growing, adding all kinds of memes and photo montages showing imaginary appliances. It became so strong that the toaster turned into a running joke in other social media as the numbers of likes climbed in the Facebook page.
Then, in April 1 2016, the company released the Razer Toaster as a joke called Project Breadwinner, reigniting the challenge. YouTube personality @LinusTechTips joined the fray, talking about it. Others followed soon with more videos.
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The toaster fandom went so far that people started to tattoo themselves with the Razer Toaster. Twelve people in total inked the the imaginary toaster forever into their skin.
Then, on April 29, Tan finally gave in to the fans. The Facebook page only had 44,000 likes but — probably seeing the potential for a good marketing story or just wishing that people would just stop putting dumb toasters on their bodies — he thought that each of those tattoos were worth at least 100,000 Facebook likes.
Whatever his logic and reasons are, though, he made the compromise to make the toaster happen. In the post, he declared that Razer was going to put his team of designers and engineers to make the toasters. “It will take a few years,” he wrote, “but I’ll be sure to share the progress and make it a community affair.”
That gives me hope that this won’t be just one more of those novelty toasters that burns an image while leaving the rest of the bread underdone. Perhaps it will have individual pixel heating elements that can toast small areas of the bread at different levels. Or maybe it will use a regular heating element and add a laser to draw any drawing you can send to it via Wi-Fi. Now that would be a cool thing to have.
