Valve has tucked a hidden Easter egg into its new Steam Controller: If you drop the gamepad, it lets out a famous movie scream.
The discovery was first made by a Reddit user, who stumbled on the effect by chance. After tossing the controller onto a bed, it suddenly played a distinctive scream, they wrote, sharing a video as proof. Other community members quickly chimed in to confirm the behavior. Still, the effect is not that easy to trigger. There appears to be a cooldown between screams, and not every drop immediately sets it off.
PC Gamer also put it to the test. Writer Morgan Park reports that the controller really does make the scream — though quietly, and only after several attempts. Even a soft surface is enough, but you’ll obviously need a bit of nerve to deliberately drop an expensive device.
Also interesting:
Steam Controller Scream: How Does It Work Without a Speaker?
The big question is how Valve pulled this off technically. The controller does not appear to have a traditional speaker built in. Instead, the haptic motors may be doing the work. These components normally create vibrations, but they can also be driven in a way that produces audible sounds. Tinkerers already showed with the first Steam Controller that simple melodies could be generated this way.
The scream itself is not just any scream, either. It is the so-called Wilhelm scream, a stock sound effect that has appeared in films again and again since the 1950s and became an inside joke among sound designers. It can even be heard in major productions such as Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Valve now appears to have paid tribute to that iconic effect in its hardware.
Sources: Reddit, PC Gamer, Wired
