'Everybody who worked at Nvidia in the early days really wanted to make a game console' says senior VP of engineering Andrew Bell: 'Selfishly, a little bit, we built Shield for ourselves'

I sometimes forget about the existence of Nvidia's Shield devices, in all their various iterations. Shield TV, however, has been with us now for over a decade in some form or another—and according to Nvidia, the Android-powered set-top box is far from done yet.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Nvidia's senior VP of hardware engineering, Andrew Bell, talks in reverence about the Shield devices and what they mean to the company. Like all good ideas, it seems, Bell says the Shield project came from an enthusiastic group of engineers:

"Pretty much everybody who worked at Nvidia in the early days really wanted to make a game console," Bell opines.

"To build a game console was pretty complicated because, of course, you have to have a GPU, which we know how to make... but in addition to that, you need a CPU, an OS, games, and you need a UI."

Through a series of acquisitions and partnerships, (including the purchase of PortalPlayer in 2007, which led to the Tegra Arm chips at their hearts), Nvidia gradually gathered the elements that would make up its early Shield iterations.

However, while the early Shield devices were focussed around gaming on the move, the project eventually morphed into a streaming-first experience for home TV usage. The key switch came from Google's development of Android TV, which brought a clean, efficient UI and software platform into the equation.

"Selfishly, a little bit, we built Shield for ourselves," says Bell. "We actually wanted a really good TV streamer that was high-quality and high-performance, and not necessarily in the Apple ecosystem. We built some prototypes, and we got so excited. [CEO Jensen Huang] was like, 'Why don't we bring it out and sell it to people?'"

To this day, the Shield TV is often mentioned as one of the most high-quality, reliable methods of streaming media to a home theatre setup, and that seems to be a key crux of its current design:

“Eventually, we kind of said, ‘Maybe the soul is that it’s a streamer for gamers. We understand gamers from GeForce, and we understand they care about quality and performance," says Bell.

"A lot of these third-party devices like tablets, they’re going cheap. Set-top boxes, they’re going cheap. But we were the only company that was like, 'Let’s go after people who really want a premium experience.'"

Perhaps the biggest testament to the Shield TV's endurance is the level of support it's been afforded by Nvidia since its inception, at least according to Bell:

"Early on when we were building Shield TV, we decided we were going to make it for a long time. Jensen and I had a discussion, and it was, ‘How long do we want to support this thing?’ And Jensen said, ‘For as long as we shall live.'"

At that point, a solemn reverence began to hang over the room, as a choir chanted in the... okay, I'm making this bit up. Still, it's refreshing to hear that Nvidia has put support and continual updates at the heart of the Shield experience from day one, and as a result the device is still held in high esteem—even if there's been the odd wobble along the way.

And while it's been over six years since the last hardware refresh of Nvidia's set-top (it really should be set-under, shouldn't it?) box, it seems that development of a new version is far from off the table:

"We’re always playing in the labs, trying to discover new things," says Bell. "We’ve played with new concepts for Shield and we’ll continue to play, and if we find something we’re super-excited about, we’ll probably make a go of it."

Watch this space, perhaps?

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1. Best gaming laptop: Razer Blade 16

2. Best gaming PC: HP Omen 35L

3. Best handheld gaming PC: Lenovo Legion Go S SteamOS ed.

4. Best mini PC: Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT

5. Best VR headset: Meta Quest 3

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