Valve, you cheeky bunch. It wasn't enough to stand out by doubling down on touchpads, going all in on gyro, and sporting TMR joysticks: the new Steam Controller also has an Easter egg.
As discovered by user RF3D19 on Reddit this week, the $99 gamepad is capable of expressing panic. When suddenly dropped, the device occasionally lets out a wailing Wilhelm scream. You know the one.
When PC Gamer's Josh Wolens strolled into the chatroom to share this discovery with the rest of the class, I was doubtful. Anyone could've faked the sound effect in this brief 2-second video or specially modded their controller to scream, but others in the Reddit thread insisted it's legit. I wasn't terribly excited to conduct my own test with the controller I just opened last week, but everyone insisted I'd get a Wilhelm from even light drops onto padded surfaces…
I can confirm: the Steam Controller screams. It's really quiet (video below), and you do need to drop it from so high that you'll question if your couch is actually soft enough to break its fall, but this thing will scream.
Mine only screamed once at first and then went silent for several more unwise drops onto its back triggers. As folks on Reddit have also encountered, the sound trigger seems to have a cooldown period of a minute or more between screams.
How does it work? Perhaps the scream actually belongs to a demonic imp living inside, though I theorize that it's all haptics and gyros. The Steam Controller doesn't have an obvious front-firing speaker like a PS5 controller, but its chunky haptic motors could be programmed to play virtually any sound. This was also true of the first Steam Controller. Back in the day, modding made it relatively easy to program the haptics yourself, so we made ours sing the Star Spangled Banner.
The quality isn't great, which is why the feature is normally used for simple beeps. Unless Valve snuck a tiny speaker into the body, it apparently made a special case for this fun secret.
