YouTuber Bringus Studios got their hands on an early Steam Deck Prototype and recently posted a video showing themselves talking about its build quality and disassembling it to get to its lovely innards. The kicker to this video, though, is that the console isn’t even his to begin with.

The Steam Deck Prototype – engineering sample 34 – actually belongs to X user, SadlyItsDadley, who lent his unit to Bringus so willingly. We say “so willingly” because he paid US$3,000 (RM12,743) for it. The sentiment is clear; that’s an expensive piece of gaming history.

This Steam Deck prototype, by the way, is the same prototype that was sold on eBay last month, which means that SadlyItsDadley is likely the same person as the one who purchased the machine, Gary_the_mememachine.

As Bringus proceeds to explain in his video, the Steam Deck prototype is clearly very different from the final form of the Steam Deck. For starters, the touchpads are round instead of square, the right analog stick is just an orange nub and just a “touch sensor”; it comes with two Steam buttons; and the trigger and shoulder buttons look flatter to the back of the console.

Internally, the BIOS of the Steam Deck Prototype says that the console was using an AMD Ryzen 7 3700U – good to see that Valve was still sticking with Red Team – 8GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and an Intel Wi-Fi module. Bringus said he copied the original SSD to another one for preservation and to his surprise, it contained an early version of SteamOS with three pre-installed accounts, one of which was the official “34” account. Sadly, he wasn’t able to get access to it.

The Steam Deck has been undeniably successful among PC gamers, allowing them to play their favourite titles, AAA or indie, on the go, literally. While it can be argued that Nintendo laid the foundation for gaming handhelds with the launch of the Switch in 2017, it is Valve’s creation that really drove the renaissance for handhelds, even spawning competitors such as the ASUS ROG Ally Series, the Lenovo Legion Go Series, and even the MSI Claw lineup.

(Source: Tom’s Hardware, Bringus Studios via YouTube)

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