Steam Deck Mod Brings Back Physical Games With Ancient Floppies

As a further sign of the ongoing retro revival in gaming, a Steam Deck user has modified their Deck to use modified floppy discs to start up games, as VideoCardz reports. Unlike a recent SATA SSD mod that kept the game files on the drive itself, this one doesn’t actually store the games on the disks, but it does boot them up as soon as you plug them in, making for a classic console-like experience.

The way it works is each floppy (with gorgeous game-appropriate art) contains a Steam URL that can tell the Steam Deck to launch the game. So when it’s plugged in, the file runs, and the game runs in turn. It’s a clean implementation, given that each floppy disk can only hold 1.44MB.

The process is much more convoluted than just running the game normally. It takes a few attempts in the preview video to get it to work, and the floppy drive takes a few seconds to read the URL it’s trying to use to boot the game. The noises are certainly nostalgic, though, and some commenters pointed out that using physical games in this manner would be a much simpler way to age-gate a Steam Library than the modern family control system.

This is all vibe-coded with Claude, so hand-written code would likely do it far better and cleaner. But it’s a neat little mod that pays homage to a dead technology in a fun and modern way. The developer says it also supports NFC tags, QR codes, and USB drives, so there’s potential to expand this system for alternative uses.