It's hard to convey just how revolutionary the original voodoo cards were. There aren't many times in my life where there was a clear line of before and after, but this was one of those times.
They also had the most recognizable unified box art style from all HW makers[1]. When you saw those eyes staring into your soul off the shelves, you knew it was a 3dfx GPU. They also had the best ads. [2] HW vendors today don't have the balls anymore to use designs like that, it's all flat sterile corporate nonsense.
Unless I'm mistaken, those cards were all produced by 3dfx after their acquisition of STB. Regardless, that box art blew my 14 year old mind back in the day.
I think mine went into a computer that we donated to a school, or something. Around 2002 or 2003, my dad and I put together a bunch of working systems out of spare parts and donated them.
Mine was the PCI version of the card. Crazy looking on Ebay how much even the bare card goes for now, let alone when someone has the full boxed set.
I wiped my drive a few times before realizing dropbox didn't back my wallet up. I shrugged it off losing 30 bitcoins worth maybe at best 3 cents each at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.
Still blows my mind that it was just a flash in the pan. At the time it felt that 3dfx was certainly going to be a dominant force in computing for years. And although they lingered a bit, the whole event was barely over 2 years.
I think everyone understood that having it be 3D-only (and requiring a separate graphics card to do normal 2D desktop graphics) was a half-solution, and 3DFX's long term success would depend on their ability to provide a full 2D/3D solution before existing competitors like NVIDIA, ATI, and Matrox could catch up with their own 3D accelerators.
I remember reading a historical piece where the voodoos success was partially luck. At the time the first generation cards were being developed edo ram was super expensive so most competitive designs were hamstrung trying to do things with very little ram. By luck edo ram prices crashed right as they released making them far more affordable to manufacture than 3dfx could have reasonably expected. That gave them an early and massive lead with their initial design.
That took a lot longer really as well... I remember seeing SATA SSDs around 2009, paying a massive amount for my 64gb Intel drive (that ate itself just over a year later)... I hated moving/symlinking so much... but, fortunately by the time it died, I could go to 256gb or 512gb (don't quite remember which) for not too much more.
Even then, I was still seeing most Desktops sold with spinning rust for several years later.
