An article for The Seattle Times exposes the workings behind-the-scenes at Valve on their incredibly ambitious Steam Machine project, with the first photo of the prototype released to the public.
They also reveal a serious of controller designs the company went through, with a shop of Valve employees producing enough for the 300 beta testers this fall.
According to the piece, ”40 of Valve’s 330 employees are tinkering with hardware” in a bid to bring PC gaming to the living room. The controllers are all built from scratch by Valve.
”Valve is about to release the first batch of prototype Steam Machine computers that it designed, running an operating system the company developed in-house,” wrote The Seattle Times. ”These souped-up boxes work with an entirely new game controller that Valve designed and built from scratch in workshops the company cobbled together in Bellevue, partly with tools scavenged from co-founder Gabe Newell’s garage.”
”Its offices in a downtown Bellevue high-rise now have 3-D printers whirring away printing PC components, right next to a room full of programmers intently peering into their big monitors.”
”There are also laser-cutting machines and other tools for designing, building and testing prototypes,” they continued. ”The landlord said no to a full-blown factory, so the game controllers that Valve is providing to 300 testers this fall are being produced by employees at a shop in Overlake.”
Check out the full article for more on Valve’s little Steam Machine enterprise.
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