As part of the opening event for Steam Deck In Asia, Valve showed off a collection of playable console / mini-PC prototypes that show how the device has evolved from mid-2019 to the design that has finally been launched. Pierre-Loup Griffais, a company employee and member of the team responsible for the Steam Deck, posted images of some prototypes via Twitter after the device was unveiled at the Tokyo Game Show.

You can see from the images that Valve has been clear about the concept and general design lines of the Steam Deck for quite some time. However, notable differences can also be seen, with some prototypes having a more rounded surface and others more rectangular. Probably the ones that are getting the most attention from the public are the ones that feature circular trackpads, which more than one has interpreted as reminiscent of the late Steam Controller.

When we say prototypes are playable, it means they work. In fact, Griffais undertook to release a video via his Twitter account in which shows one of them running what looks like an immature version of SteamOS that boots directly into Big Picture as a GUI. Once the operating system and Steam client loaded, the Valve employee launched Half-Life 2, all with seemingly quick and seamless response.

The prototype put to work by Griffais uses a Picasso-generation APU, which according to a Valve employee is half as powerful as the one used by the Steam Deck, which features the use of RDNA 2 technology for graphics processing. It’s likely that Valve preferred to wait for AMD’s APUs to use graphics technology that offered better guarantees for running triple-A Windows games, albeit at reduced quality.

The history of the many prototypes developed to create the Steam Deck is not new, as Valve itself revealed images of them in a book it recently published, in which it not only explains the creation process, but also his plans for the future, in which he stated that he will launch new versions/generations of his consolidate/mini-PC, that he will continue to bet on SteamOS (Linux) and that he has his eyes on ChromeOSGoogle’s desktop operating system.

If you want to know all the answers why Steam Deck is able to run some Windows games with good performance, despite running on Linux, we invite you to take a look at the special we dedicated to it.