The Steam Controller Screams When You Drop It

"The initials for Jordan are J-A-M. For those that know, that's a callback to the original creators of Naughty Dog and their name." That was actress Tati Gabrielle on X last week, talking about a hidden reference in Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. Easter eggs in games are nothing new. But an Easter egg in a controller? That's Valve being Valve.

Reddit user RF3D19 discovered earlier this week that the new $99 Steam Controller plays the Wilhelm scream when you drop it. Not every time, and not from every height, but drop it from roughly three feet while Steam is in Big Picture mode and you'll occasionally hear the most overused sound effect in cinema history squeaking out of your gamepad. Multiple outlets, including VGC and PC Gamer, have independently verified it works. I love everything about this.

How a controller screams

The Steam Controller doesn't actually have a traditional speaker. The sound comes from its haptic motors, which can be programmed to reproduce audio in much the same way the original Steam Controller's haptics could be modded to play MIDI files. The quality is rough, closer to a muffled phone speaker than anything crisp, but it's unmistakably the Wilhelm scream. There also appears to be a cooldown of a minute or more between triggers, so you can't just bounce it off your couch repeatedly and get a chorus of screaming. Valve clearly thought about this enough to make it a surprise rather than an annoyance.

The comparison to Nintendo's HD Rumble is apt. The Switch Pro Controller uses similar motor-driven audio tricks for musical sound effects in Super Mario Bros. Wonder. But Nintendo uses it as a gameplay feature. Valve used it to make their hardware scream at you for mistreating it. Both are valid engineering choices, I suppose, but only one of them is funny.

Getting your hands on the controller to test this yourself is another matter entirely. The Steam Controller went on sale May 4 through Valve's storefront and sold out across every major market within about 30 minutes. Scalpers immediately listed units on eBay for up to three times the retail price. Valve responded on May 8 by setting up a reservation queue, limited to one controller per user, with 72 hours to complete a purchase once notified. That queue is still active.

I appreciate that Valve's engineers took the time to hide something this stupid in a piece of hardware people are literally fighting to buy. The original Steam Controller had a cult following partly because it felt like a device made by people who actually enjoyed building it, not a committee trying to hit a margin target. Hiding a Wilhelm scream in the gyro sensor of its successor is exactly that energy. It doesn't affect gameplay, it doesn't sell you anything, it's just a team of engineers being silly because they could. In a year where every hardware launch seems to come with a storefront crash and a scalper problem, at least this one also comes with a scream.