Hidden Steam Controller Easter Egg Found: Reddit Discovery Reveals Valve's Secret Feature
Clearly an Easter egg that the developers added to the pad, the feature makes use of the built-in gyro and accelerometers used for motion tracking to detect when it has been dropped. It only works if you have the app in Big Picture mode, and it does not require you to drop it on a hard surface, so don't, because you absolutely could damage the pad. Drop it on something soft, like a bed or sofa.
For those unfamiliar, the Wilhelm scream is basically Hollywood's most famous recycled sound effect, it's that goofy, dramatic yell you've heard a thousand times when someone falls off a cliff, gets thrown from an explosion, or otherwise has a very bad day. It originated in the 1951 film Distant Drums, but got its name after being reused for a character named Private Wilhelm in the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River. Sound designers, particularly Star Wars and Indiana Jones designer Ben Burtt, turned it into an inside joke by sneaking it into countless movies and games, so now it's basically an audio Easter egg for anyone who recognizes it.
Obviously, this is not really the most exciting feature of the new Steam Controller. In fact, there are so many cool features of the new pad that it's hard to pick which one actually IS the most exciting. The new pad features a familiar PlayStation-like layout, with dual centered analog sticks, and those sticks use power-efficient Tunneling Magnetoresistance (TMR) instead of power-thirsty Hall-effect sensors, but the end result is the same: perfect, zero dead-zone tracking and no risk of stick drift due to zero-contact sensing.
Of course, the second-gen Steam Controller (which is simply called Steam Controller again, not "Steam Controller 2") retains the dual touchpads of the original, they're just down below the thumbsticks. This seems like it would make them awkward to use, but those who have put hands on the pad say that's not the case. Other cool features include magnetic charging, HD rumble, and the aforementioned gyro and motion inputs, activated by touch sensors in the grips.
Fundamentally, the new pad is basically like a Steam Deck without all of the PC parts, which allows it to make use of the Steam Input profiles that people have been creating in the four years and two months since the Steam Deck launched. If you're keen to grab a new Steam Controller for yourself, hopefully you have a Steam account in good standing. There's a reservation queue where you can reserve a spot to purchase exactly one pad when stock becomes available; when your number comes up, you'll have 72 hours to pay for the $100 controller. Valve might be doing the same thing with the Steam Machine, too, so if you're after one of those, get ready to repeat this rigamarole.
