Valve fan creates unsettling posters for Steam Machine, Frame, and controller inspired by PlayStation's 2000s ads
A creative fan published a series of posters for Valve's new products – Steam Machine, Steam Controller, and Steam Frame, inspired by the provocative advertising campaigns of the first two PlayStation generations. The artist, calling himself a huge Valve fan, created visuals referencing Y2K marketing, which featured an uncomfortable yet highly effective aesthetic.
I'm a huge fan of Valve. And it's not even about the games – although they're great – but about every product that comes out of their walls. It's one of the few places in the world where design genuinely serves problem-solving, and those problems are identified with precision.
The black-and-white posters use disturbing imagery to illustrate key features of Valve's products.
For Steam Frame – the VR headset announced in November 2025 – a poster features a human face with sewn-shut eyes, labeled "Immersive."
For Steam Machine – the compact gaming PC running SteamOS launching in early 2026 – the design shows Egyptian pyramids with a lightning bolt-shaped zipper and the text "Backward compatibility," emphasizing day-one access to the entire Steam library.
Steam Controller received a poster depicting a human torso with magnetic button-joysticks, illustrating "Magnetic thumbsticks" – the TMR-based magnetic sticks that are the new controller's signature feature.
A fourth Steam Machine poster shows a pregnant belly with the text "The biggest game library on a launch day... ever," referencing the massive Steam catalog available immediately at device launch.
The designer noted:
I wanted to highlight a features that remains largely unreadable outside the community this poster is meant for.
The works used photographs from Unsplash by Alyona Grishina, Max Boheme, and LonelyBlue. The style was deliberately adapted to contemporary realities while preserving the spirit of Sony's original advertising, which offered a clear alternative to the dominant marketing of that era.
Steam Machine positions itself as a living room platform with performance six times higher than Steam Deck, capable of running all Steam games at 4K60 with FSR upscaling. The device features a 6-core AMD Zen 4 processor and semi-custom RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units, 16GB DDR5-5600, and 512GB or 2TB storage.
