If you’ve wanted to have your Steam Deck boot up with something over than the handheld’s logo, a beta update that’s available to install will let you do that.
By going to Settings > System > Steam Update Channel > Beta, you can install this update (opens in new tab) that also changes the resolution when connected to an external display, saving you the hassle of doing this once your Steam Deck is plugged into one.
Enabling a different animation is a simple affair, where you drop a video into ‘steamui/overrides/movies/‘ when in Desktop mode, and once the Steam Deck starts up, it will look for a video in this folder, and play it when the Deck next boots up.
There’s already a Reddit thread (opens in new tab) that features a bunch of videos that you can download and use in this directory, but it made us wonder what we could use ourselves.
Steam Spice
Of course, with it being the 25th anniversary of the Spiceworld album (opens in new tab), you may want to feature the intro to one of the Spice Girls’ songs, such as Who Do You Think You Are. Seeing that boot up would certainly spice up your Steam Deck with every boot.
Yet you could install others such as the boot-up videos for gaming consoles from the past. From PlayStation 1 to Xbox, there’s a bunch you can download from this link (opens in new tab) and place into the folder that Valve’s specified, and your Deck could play a mix of these and Spice Girls videos.
It speaks a lot about how Valve is keeping an eye on the community’s innovative efforts, with YouTubers (opens in new tab) bringing out unofficial ways to do this previously. With this amount of customization, it only makes us wonder what else we’ll be able to do by the time 2022 ends.