While Valve’s newest Steam Controller has already made plenty of noise in the gaming space, there may be one unexpected feature nobody saw coming.
As spotted by Reddit user RF3D19, the new Steam Controller includes a hidden Easter egg that activates when the controller is dropped from a certain height. According to the discovery, dropping the controller from around three feet or higher causes it to let out a scream. Not just any scream, either. It appears to play the legendary Wilhelm scream, the famous sound effect that has been used across movies, TV shows, video games, and just about everything else for decades.
This is the kind of weird and playful thing Valve would do. According to those who tested it, the Easter egg actually works.
Now, I’m not one to always believe everything I read on the internet, and being an IT guy, I need to see how stuff works for myself. Since I had a Steam Controller that was recently delivered, I figured why not give it a shot and see if this was real.
And yep, it works, though it took a while before I could get it to trigger. After taking it out of the box and charging it, I could not get it to make the screaming sound after more than 50 drops. I updated the firmware and tried again, but still nothing happened. It wasn’t until I started my PC, put Steam into Big Picture Mode, and tried again that I finally got it working. After that, it triggered about six out of ten times when I dropped the controller onto my couch full of pillows, because no, I’m not about to drop a brand-new controller onto a hardwood floor that’s sitting on a concrete slab just for science.
It is such a small thing to add to the controller, and somewhere out there, a few Valve engineers are probably smiling now that someone finally discovered this Easter egg. At the same time, it also has me wondering what else could be hidden away inside the controller.
Either way, it is a cool little Easter egg, and it is exactly the sort of random thing I would expect Valve to sneak into its hardware. I just hope my son does not find out about it, because I can already see him sneaking into my office, snatching the controller, and dropping it over and over until the battery wears out.
