A YouTube creator has been able to get their hands on an early Steam Deck prototype (engineering sample 34) and disassembled it on camera to show off its clean internal layout. X (formerly Twitter) user SadlyItsDadley lent the unit to Jon Bringus of Bringus Studios, saying, “…he was easily the best person to archive this piece of gaming history.”
Once it was in his hands, Bringus set about stripping the cover off the Steam Deck evaluation unit on his YouTube channel. Interestingly, the device came with a piece of paper marked as “POC2-34 Control 163”, signifying that the console he had in his hands was indeed proof-of-concept number 34. Aside from exploring it physically, Jon also tried running some games on the handheld, showing us how far Valve has come since it first started toying with the idea of a portable Steam gaming console.
The external look of this evaluation unit is a bit different from the Steam Deck that we know and love today. For one, its touchpads are huge circles, a far cry from the cleaner rectangular units found on the current console. Its dual joysticks are also much smaller than what we’re used to, and the contoured palm rests are a bit different on the experimental unit. Its BIOS indicated that this model was packing an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U and 8GB of RAM. It also came with a 256GB SSD and an Intel Wi-Fi chip, plus the system said that it had discrete GPU support (although Bringus wasn’t able to test this capability).
The YouTuber copied the original SSD to another one to maintain its integrity. He inserted the imaged drive, and to his surprise, it contained an early version of SteamOS with three pre-installed accounts. Unfortunately, he can’t access the seemingly official ‘34’ account, which corresponds with the device’s POC number. Furthermore, the SteamOS on the unit was built on September 30, 2020 — about a year and a half before the Steam Deck went on sale, roughly showing us at what part of the development cycle this particular sample existed.
Valve launched a renaissance in handheld gaming consoles with the Steam Deck. Although Nintendo established the groundwork for the 'default' modern mainstream gaming handheld form factor in 2017 with the Switch, it was the popularity of the Steam Deck that caught the attention of major PC hardware manufacturers. Because of this, these companies realized that there were a good number of people who wanted to play PC games on the go, resulting in the birth of competing hardware like the Asus ROG Ally family, the Lenovo Legion Go series, the MSI Claw line of handhelds, and many more.
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