Lord, I’m in love with Valve’s Steam Deck TGS booth

rockpapershotgun.com:

The Steam Deck’s Asia release has taken it to the Tokyo Game Show, following a solo launch event that included several surviving Steam Deck prototypes. In my report on the latter I made some passing references to a novelty oversized Deck that Valve were building for their TGS booth, completely unaware of how often I’d find myself admiring it a few days later. See, the Steam Deck booth at TGS, from the towering scale model to the weirdly impressive elegance of its logistics, might be the finest event booth I’ve ever seen.

I’m not sorry! Just look at it: even without the Big Deck, which comes complete with a suitably giant, functioning screen, it’s a beautiful bit of exhibition design. The sprawling, cooly lit space; the neat racks of demo units; the fact that there are actual seats?! People can go to a big event like this and sit down on something besides a revolting floor? Incredible. Bet they’ve even got bottled water that isn’t sparkling.

As you can probably infer, booths like these are not the norm. I’ve beat feet around a few tech shows in my time, and the usual routine when going to try out a piece of hardware is thus: you show up to a booth that already has too many people in it for its size, move to where the crowd around the demo kit is thinnest, shuffle awkwardly for a few minutes, then move to a completely different section of crowd anyway because a YouTuber is here and wants everyone to move ten feet back so he can set up his tripod.

Oh, to have written more hands-ons after visiting booths like the Steam Deck’s. A video from Valve designer Lawrence Yang shows a far more civilised visiting experience, starting with a nice walk into the enormous main area and ending with playing a Steam Deck on your choice of