If you saw the season two finale of hit Adult Swim cartoon Smiling Friends last week, you could make out in the lower-right corner, taking up a generous 4% of the screen, the distinctive quadruple back buttons of the Steam Deck being slapped by the fingerless hands of supporting character Glep, a 1,695-year-old frog guy, reclined in a bean bag chair.
An official Valve gaming handheld, clearly visible for eight seconds of an 11-minute cartoon? Truly, this was the moment PC gaming became mainstream.
OK, no, this was not the dawning moment of cultural acceptance of our decades-old hobby, which you could reasonably argue is the first and oldest gaming platform. By my count, PC gaming has enjoyed mainstream visibility on par with its console counterparts arguably as far back as 2017 or 2018, when the generation that grew up on Minecraft reached ages that made it a perfect audience for games deeply steeped in the spirit of PC gaming. (Also, technically, Smiling Friends referenced PC gaming a whole year earlier last season when it showed us a depressed Satan spending time playing Rust and hanging out on Discord. Relatable, Satan.)
If mainstream-ness is measured in television appearances, readers of this very website will know that PC gaming has been blessed for some time by the acknowledgement that only minor-to-medium celebrities can provide. A wing of our website was temporarily dedicated to documenting Henry Cavill’s PC gaming habit, but earlier than that, Terry Crews spoke to us in 2017 about discovering PC building, and Chloë Grace Moretz built her own $4000 desktop in 2022. The greatest chess player in the world appeared in a Hearthstone ad. Jack Black operated a gaming YouTube channel for a few years.
