Steam Deck’s custom boot videos are getting very creative indeed
Think of them as the Deck's strapline
Owners of Valve’s handheld PC Steam Deck have been fiddling about with creating and sharing their own ten-second animations for the machine’s new custom boot video feature, implemented in a client update last week. Some pay homage to Valve and Steam, while others nod towards games in general, or even classic telly and film. I’ve had a rummage around to help give you some ideas, and found the batch below.
I’ve always been a fan of handhelds. One of my favourite custom boots so far is this “handheld history” montage by KnightMD:
Who doesn’t love a bit of ISS 64 and, by extension, its Peruvian bootleg Mundial Ronaldinho Soccer 64? Maple Gloom tweeted their custom boot vid created in honour of the 2020 meme:
Dev Enrique Colinet’s Steam Deck been personalised in fetching Gordon Freeman orange, which I guess also makes it look a little like one flavour of Nintendo’s box-shaped sixth-gen console:
Other Deck owners have turned to the gogglebox for inspiration, even repurposing Futurama’s intro for their custom boot video. Shut up and take my money, as Fry might say:
Twitterer Everdraed may have won the custom boot video crown for their take on an old gag from The Simpsons, though. I respect the effort taken to edit sound clips of Gabe for this:
Those are all cool ways to start up your handheld, but Valve found themselves in a spot recently for another Deck-related video. The company uploaded a promo video last week to announce that reserving a Steam Deck was a thing of the past, along with the availability of the Deck’s dock at last. Pretty quickly, it was noticed that the Steam Deck featured in the video had the Nintendo Switch emulator Yuzu on it. Valve took the video down and reuploaded it without the emulator in view. Oops.
You can find some of these Steam Deck custom boot videos and a whole bunch more to download at SteamDeckRepo here. Now I just need to actually own a Steam Deck and I'm all set.