I discovered this unfinished opinion piece in my hard drive.
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It’s shiny, it’s smooth, it’s packed with expensive components, it’s competitively priced. It’s the Steam Deck.
There are a few reasons the Steam Deck has me going wild. First and foremost, Valve’s latest project speaks to me on an instinctual, almost primordial level. I am a Gameboy baby. Always have been. In fact, I grew from a Nintendo playing baby to a Nintendo playing adult, and these days I’ve spend more time looking at a Switch screen than I care to admit. I also really like computers in general. Spending time with them is cathartic. I like installing things and browsing internet forums and generally wasting time on a screen. The problem with Nintendo systems like the Gameboy and the Switch is that they don’t let you do very much with them besides play games. The Steam Deck promises to take the beautiful concept of a personal computer and merge it with a portable gaming console under one sexy plastic package.
Do you even know what I’m talking about? It occurs to me that unless you are already immersed in the computer gaming world, the Steam Deck might be niche knowledge. If you aren’t in the know, Valve, creator of the venerated gaming platform Steam, is creating its own portable gaming system. It’s basically a grey Nintendo Switch without detachable controllers. In turn, a Switch is a sort of really powerful Gameboy. A Gameboy was like a phone before there were phones, except that it can’t make calls or texts or access the internet. You used to look like a tool for carrying around a Gameboy, but look now—everybody is glued to their phone screens. I like to consider the Steam Deck the latest in a lineage of Gameboys stretching as far back as the history of electronic gaming itself. The Steam Deck is a very fat Gameboy.
Besides its drab color scheme and bulkier design, the Steam Deck performs a similar role to Nintendo’s product. The Switch was a major step forward in portable gaming because it could bring large 3D games like Zelda portable. Before, such titles were relegated to home consoles. The deck can play high quality games portably, and it can be docked and attached to a monitor or television to project its screen onto a larger display. For folks that mainly game in their homes with immobile Playstations or Wiis or PCs, this may not seem particularly interesting (although there ARE reasons stationary gamers might be interested in a Deck, to be discussed later). To longtime Gameboy babies, however, the Steam Deck represents the culmination of a decade spanning project to liberate quality gaming experiences from the confines of the home.
The history of mobile gaming is long and fractured. Before the iPhone made it cool to stare at a computer screen in public, there were Gameboys. I inherited the original Gameboy from my father and a Gameboy Color from somebody (maybe my brother), but I was too young to really use these things. They were arcane toys that beeped, and without backlit screens, actually seeing what was going on on screen was difficult. I remember there being a booklight adapter for them that could be clipped to the Gameboy to illuminate the screen in the dark. I didn’t really “get” the Gameboy until I got my first Gameboy SP sometime in the early 2000s. I had a Yoshi’s Island Cartridge with it, and while I wasn’t very good or successful with the games, I was in love. Super Mario World on the Gameboy was one of the first games I ever beat all by myself. When I finally realized you could escape your bedroom in Pokemon Ruby by setting the clock, the course of my childhood changed forever. Pokemon and Mario were my Gods. The Gameboy eventually became the DS which eventually became the Switch. PSPs, Ipod Touches, and phones also entered the mix.
The problem with mobile gaming for many years was that the quality of the experience was always a few steps behind that of the immobile console and computer games. For example, most of my favorite games on the Gameboy SP were ports of SNES games. While Gamecube players were experiencing beautiful 3D gameplay in Wind Waker and Sunshine, the Gameboy were largely stuck with games made a decade ago. If it wasn’t a ported platformer, Metroid, or Kirby, I was probably playing an RPG like Pokemon or Fire Emblem. While 2D platformers and turn based RPGs flourished on the Gameboy, it could not capture the kind of immersive 3D experiences that was being developed for the more expensive equipement. The DS opened with Super Mario 64 DS, a port of the genre defining 3D platforming masterpiece that was originally released a decade before. Even the 3DS, though it had some truly console quality experiences in the likes of Smash 4, was mostly a Pokemon/Fire Emblem machine. These Gameboy style games were fun and addictive, but you weren’t playing Dark Souls. As PC gaming and the indie revolution really took off in the 2010s, the DS line felt increasingly lackluster. It wasn’t until the release of the Switch in 2017 that modern gaming experiences could finally be had on a portable platform. Until then, mobile gaming was usually second rate.
I love the Switch, I really do. The thing is, I don’t use it for the Nintendo games anymore. At least, I’m not using the ones Nintendo wants me to use. Like the Gameboy that came before it, the Switch has an expansive library of ports. A slew of indie games previously only available on PC or console have never been better after finding a home on the Switch. You can also hack the Switch to emulate pretty much everything up to the N64 (and even PSP games to an imperfect extent). I particularly like having Dark Souls portable.
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It is a little scatterbrained. I was pretty hyped for Valve’s handheld.
The Steam Deck is actually in my hands now. In some ways, it makes me miss my old Gameboy SP. It is far too large for comfort (though resting it on my belly in bed takes much of the load off), and the battery life is awful. On the other hand, the Deck is providing me the greatest portable Minecraft experience I have ever seen. I can play Better Than Wolves in bed. That’s incredible.
I plan to write a real Steam Deck review sometime. It’s is a fantastic project littered with bugs and flaws. It is a project so fantastic that the flaws barely matter.
Happy Solstice! I love the long afternoons of June.