Summary
- A rare Steam Deck prototype has just sold for $2,000 on eBay.
- It only opens to the BIOS right now, and doesn’t have SteamOS built-in, so it can’t play any games.
- Regardless, it’s a prized piece of gaming history.
An incredibly rare Steam Deck was sold yesterday on eBay for an eye-watering $2,000.
The Steam Deck in question is an “early Valve engineering 34 prototype”, and there are some major differences to the retail version. Several parts of the console, such as the bumpers and the ‘A’ and ‘B’ buttons, are light blue, the trackpads are circular and stick out more, and there’s a right joystick in place of an analog stick. The console itself also has more pronounced curved edges.
The console has a big stamp on the back that says “not for resale” — oops.
It’s definitely more of a collector’s item than a functioning handheld, since it only opens to the BIOS right now and doesn’t have built-in SteamOS. Ergo, they can’t play any games. With some finagling, they could probably get it running like an ordinary Steam Deck, but whether they’d want to risk damaging it through use is another question entirely. Already, the “left touchpad is loose” and “the two wires to run the vibration feedback have been disconnected”.
There Are Several Steam Deck Prototypes Out There, And Each One Is Unique
The Steam Deck went through a lot of iterations before being unveiled, with Switch-style detachable controllers, an orange-and-blue colour scheme (probably a play on Portal, especially with the Aperture Desk Job tech demo), more triangular corners, and even versions with the touchpads removed.
Some were oddly wide; one had awkward hand-grips hanging off the side with open slots for TV-remote-shaped controllers; and several didn’t even feature a traditional D-pad, with separate buttons instead. Thankfully, Valve abandoned that idea altogether.
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A lot of these variations will exist in the wild somewhere, and it’s no surprise that they fetch a pretty penny. They’re a part of gaming history, marking different points in the Steam Deck’s development before Valve landed on the final design. $2,000 doesn’t seem so bad for such a rare collector’s item, especially since the limited-edition white OLED model goes for as much as $800 to $1,000.
It’ll be interesting to see if the buyer can get it working, maybe giving us a hands-on impression of how it feels to play with bulkier trackpads and less flush buttons. But I wouldn’t blame them if they stuck it in a glass display cabinet.