Microsoft has brought back its old Intellimouse design after around ten years in the wilderness, releasing the new Classic Intellimouse. So, what’s changed? Design-wise... nothing. In fact Microsoft actually used the original Intellimouse 3.0 CAD files from 2002 to manufacture the brand new rodent.
It was the only way Microsoft could “really pay the right respect and build the right product,” Simon Dearsley, the devices design director at Microsoft, told me when I spoke to him about the new mouse. We also got to talk about what’s changed, and why now is the perfect time to bring back one of the most iconic old-school gaming mice from the beforetimes, the long, long ago.
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“Actually, the only reason we stopped selling it sometime in the late 2000's,” explains Dearsley, “was because the original chipset supplier that supplies the sensor actually end-of-lifed the sensor platform. And, at the time, I think the company’s priorities were a little bit different and so we just decided to end-of-life the product.”
But with the huge interest in the Intellimouse design it’s now time to bring it back, most especially with the number of fans the mouse has in the Chinese gaming market.
“We did know that clones of it, and copies of it, are being sold in pretty large volumes in China, because there is a huge gaming market over there,” says Dearsley. “We just thought it was an interesting time for us to do something with our legacy and celebrate the technological changes that we've made in mice technology since then.”