I do want to rather stress that this historically-supported suspicion of mine did really last on the order of merely hours, though, as the very next day Zeal blew away my ideas with another Instagram story update. While the thread had picked up some small amount of interest at the time, it and design-related difficulties with respect to manufacturing and costs of the design effectively led to the permanent shelving of the plan in early April of 2016 by Zeal. Stretching all the way back in time to before the release of the 78g weighting for the Zealios switches, a Geekhack thread was started by Zeal titled “Clicky Zealio with a twist” discussing his interest in modifying the old Artistotle stems into that of a ‘modern Zealio switch’ that was “not going to resemble anything close to what Cherry or Gateron has to offer”. Having previously been known for both his linear and tactile switches, many users have since forgotten that Zeal had first been interested in adding a clicky switch to his offering lineup several years prior, going all the way back to late 2015. Having completely missed the slightly different top housing design in both of the announcement photos myself, I was of the camp that Zeal had finally gotten around to exhuming the design of the famous clicky Artistotle stems and had repurposed them in a modern switch design. In the hours that followed the May 20th announcement of the ‘Clickiez’ switch name, discussion amongst switch collectors ran a bit wild with speculation as to what exactly these new switches could be. While the results of the Instagram story have since been lost to time, color-based reactions from Zeal’s Discord server have made abundantly clear that Minty Green was the community’s favorite at large. Consisting of a poll between two different stem colors of ‘Minty Green’ and ‘Highlighter Yellow’, this teaser also went on to share that the name of the new upcoming switch from Zeal was ‘Clickiez’. Further curiosity regarding the orange-stemmed prototype switch, though, would be left unanswered for several months until the next teaser which came on May 20th by way of an Instagram story. Consisting of only a single photograph of a lone Gateron switch with an orange stem and outwardly different top housing structure, this would later go on to be known as the first Zeal 3-in-1 Clickiez prototype switch which has since been seen only once more in other keyboard creator content discussed below. The first public appearance of any advertisement or mention of the Zeal Clickiez switches came by way of a detail barren post on Zeal’s Discord announcement channel and related social media on January 6th of 2020. For a further discussion of what other switches have since been released in the ‘Zeal Discord’ era, please check out the Zealio V1 Redux Switch Review where I have touched upon the history of switches released by Zeal through the end of 2021. While historically Zeal has posted teasers, interest checks, and details about his switches on Geekhack primarily, a shifting in the most active location of the keyboard community at large away from forums such as Geekhack in favor of more interactive platforms such as Discord ostensibly pushed this parallel shift by Zeal. Prior to starting a discussion of the background of the Zeal 3-in-1 Clickiez switches, it should be noted that the majority of the pre-release history of these switches exists primarily on Zeal’s Discord server and other content creators’ work and thus is subject to some level of ‘telephone game’ translation error. And I’m still excited about all of the switches too in case you were worried that I had forgotten about those! Switch Background While I’m still hashing out some final details surrounding all of this in the final few weeks to go, I have been hard at work behind the scenes for some time now and can’t possibly wait to thank all the people, sponsors, and vendors which have all pitched in to make this stream awesome already. In addition to trying to blindly identify switches in a Bakeneko by only sound and feeling alone, I’m going to have some ‘Q&A’ time, a short bit of time to flex my collection and keyboards off, and something like hundreds of switches to giveaway to lucky winners all before the end of the night and perhaps tanking my public perception irreparably. Ledger cosmos oops internet seems down.All jokes about intensive, sommelier-esque training aside I’m looking super forward to the challenge and hope you all will join me there for a fun few hours of switches and discussions about such.
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