"This is the one time in our lives when we can make a clean start. We said, 'You know what, we're not going to have X, A, B, Y. We're going to say no. We're going to make something specifically for the thing we're making it for.'"

- Valve's Chet Faliszek

The HTC Vive, which comes from a collaboration between the Taiwanese smartphone company and Valve, was a surprise when it was announced -- because Valve and Oculus had been collaborating on VR.

A story published recently on Engadget shines a light on how the headset and its associated controllers came to be -- and what informed the decisionmaking there, like the sentiment expressed above by Valve's Chet Faliszek on controller design for the device.

It's a lengthy and interesting look into the collaboration between the hardware and software companies that gave birth to an industry-leading piece of VR tech.