Smach Z’s Seven-Year Collapse: The Failed Steam Deck Predecessor and Its Hardware Lessons

That device was unveiled in June 2014 as the SteamBoy, later rebranded as the Smach Zero and finally the Smach Z. As How-To Geek recently recounted in a retrospective on the forgotten handheld, the project spent seven years promising a Steam Deck-style revolution before collapsing into bankruptcy warnings and vaporware status in 2021—the very same year Valve showed the world how to actually manufacture and ship one. Looking back at the Smach Z’s turbulent history, its archived crowdfunding disclosures, and its final post-mortem statements offers a masterclass in why designing a handheld gaming PC is one of the hardest engineering challenges in consumer electronics.

2014: The SteamBoy Pitch and the Steam Machine Era​

To understand why the SteamBoy generated so much excitement in 2014, you have to remember what PC gaming looked like at the time. Valve was actively pushing its original Steam Machines initiative and its first-generation, Debian-based SteamOS, alongside the dual-trackpad Steam Controller. The living room was the target, and Linux was the planned escape hatch from Microsoft's Windows dominance.

On the final day of E3 2014, an independent Spanish development team calling itself the SteamBoy Machine Team released a teaser for a handheld that looked like a cross between a PlayStation Vita and a bisected Steam Controller. Contemporary reporting by TechSpot noted that the device was strictly a third-party proposal with no official affiliation with Valve. The pitch included:

• Controls: Two circular touchpads flanking a 5-inch 16:9 touchscreen, eight face buttons, four triggers, and two rear action buttons.
• Announced Specs: An unspecified quad-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of internal storage.
• Target OS: SteamOS, with the ambitious claim that it would play "the majority of current games in Steam" and launch in 2015.

Even in 2014, hardware analysts spotted the cracks in that promise. Without Valve’s later Proton compatibility layer—which wouldn't debut until 2018—the original SteamOS could only run native Linux ports. Furthermore, fitting an x86 quad-core chip capable of running modern PC titles into a handheld thermal envelope in 2014 was wishful thinking; the developers themselves admitted to TechSpot at the time that the system wouldn't match desktop Steam Machines, comparing its relative power gap to that between a PS Vita and a home console.

Section Summary: The 2014 SteamBoy announcement nailed the conceptual form factor of a portable, trackpad-equipped Steam handheld, but neither the low-wattage x86 silicon nor the Linux game compatibility existed yet to back up its marketing claims.

From SteamBoy to Smach Z: Crowdfunding and the Windows 10 Pivot​

The project’s first hurdle was legal and branding-related. Lacking permission from Valve to use the "Steam" trademark, the developers renamed the device Smach Zero, and shortly thereafter settled on Smach Z.

In December 2015, the team launched its first Kickstarter campaign. It stalled out and was canceled before reaching its goal. As both How-To Geek and Notebookcheck noted, prospective backers were hesitant because the team could not show a working prototype, and PC gamers were vocally demanding Windows 10 support rather than just Linux, knowing full well that Windows was required to run the vast majority of their Steam libraries.

In 2016, the team returned with a cased unit at Gamescom and launched a second Kickstarter campaign in October 2016. This time, the pitch gained traction. According to the archived Kickstarter campaign page, 1,293 backers pledged €474,530 against a €250,000 goal, and follow-up crowdfunding via Indiegogo InDemand pushed total public pledges past the $1 million mark, as later reported by Notebookcheck.

What makes the 2016 Kickstarter archive so revealing today is the fine print regarding how the device was actually being demonstrated:

In the campaign's prototype disclosure section, the Smach team openly admitted that the physical handheld shown in photos and at Gamescom ran on a weak Intel Bay Trail chip with 2GB of RAM, had power problems, and could only run older 3D titles like Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 at roughly 15 frames per second.

Meanwhile, the much smoother Windows 10 gameplay benchmarks advertised on the campaign page—such as Metro: Last Light Redux at 35 FPS (720p High), Alien: Isolation at 35 FPS (720p Ultra), Overwatch at 30 FPS (720p Medium), and Skyrim at 25 FPS (720p High)—were not recorded on a handheld at all. They were run on an uncased AMD Merlin Falcon development board sitting on a bench, with the video feed streamed to the cased prototype when shown in hand. The team also promised passive cooling using "Copper Foam technology" and a modular hardware architecture called ClickARM that would supposedly let users upgrade the RAM, storage, and even the SoC itself.

Section Summary: While the October 2016 Kickstarter succeeded by offering a Windows 10 option and AMD embedded graphics, the campaign’s own disclosures showed a massive gap between the sluggish Intel Bay Trail physical prototype and the uncased AMD development board used to generate benchmark numbers.

Teardowns, Supplier Feuds, and the Sliding Timeline​

The 2016 campaign promised to ship units to backers in April 2017. That date came and went. Instead of shipping hardware, 2017 brought a wave of controversy that permanently damaged the project's credibility.

As highlighted in How-To Geek’s retrospective, YouTuber StopDrop&Retro published an investigation in mid-2017 alleging that the "working prototype" wasn't custom handheld engineering at all, but rather gutted parts from a Valve Steam Controller wired to the motherboard of a budget Linx Windows tablet. Simultaneously, a bitter dispute erupted between the Smach team and its Spanish hardware engineering partner, ImasD (associated with the ClickARM/Rhomb.io modular platform). In a later 2021 statement published by Notebookcheck, Smach founder Daniel Fernandez claimed the company had been "scammed by ImasD," resulting in an ongoing lawsuit, the loss of €200,000, and the need to replan the device's electronics from scratch.

Instead of folding, Smach doubled down on a hardware refresh. By March 2018, the company announced it was upgrading the internal design to an AMD Ryzen Embedded V1605B processor—a legitimately capable Zen/Vega chip for the era—and opened website preorders starting at a steep $699.

Yet the hardware continued to stumble in public:

• Tokyo Game Show 2018: Demo units on the show floor famously failed to power on.
• E3 and Gamescom 2019: Redesigned prototypes finally ran games natively on the AMD Ryzen Embedded hardware, and handheld reviewer The Phawx received a prototype unit in 2019. However, as How-To Geek noted, Doom (2016) struggled visually on the unit, several physical buttons failed to register, and the SD card slot wasn't even wired to the mainboard.
• Late 2019 to Early 2020: As Notebookcheck reported in February 2020, CEO Daniel Fernandez had promised pre-order shipments by the end of 2019, only for backers to be met with radio silence on social media and a fresh delay into 2020 blamed on defective plastic casing molds in China and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Meanwhile, the rest of the industry wasn't waiting around. GPD had already shipped the original GPD Win in 2016 and followed it up with the GPD Win 2 in 2018. One-Netbook and AyaNeo were entering the Windows handheld space. And Nintendo had sold tens of millions of Switch consoles since March 2017, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that gamers wanted high-end portable hardware.

Section Summary: Between 2017 and 2020, the Smach Z was crippled by a partner lawsuit, prototype scandals, and a ballooning $699 price tag, while competitors like GPD actually delivered working Windows handhelds to paying customers.

May 2021: The Post-Mortem vs. Valve's Execution​

The end finally arrived in May 2021. In an candid post-mortem statement shared with backers and published in full by Notebookcheck, Smach founder Daniel Fernandez announced that the company had lost its private investment backing, had shrunk to just three to five workers under a Spanish government pandemic furlough program (ERTE), and was on the verge of bankruptcy, admitting that the chances of the handheld ever shipping were low.

For hardware engineers and IT professionals, the specific technical failures Fernandez listed in that May 2021 farewell letter are far more interesting than simple crowdfunding drama. Even after moving plastic mold production from China to Spain, the project hit two brick walls during pre-production testing of the first 200 units:

1. Failed CE Emissions Testing: In the certification laboratory, the unit failed electromagnetic emissions tests due to a faulty power charger that the supplier had previously claimed was certified.
2. Critical Battery Thermal Runaway / Shutdowns: Whenever the handheld’s battery charge dropped below 10% and the charger was plugged in, dangerous heating occurred inside the battery pack. This thermal spike triggered the hardware's automatic safety protection, abruptly shutting down the entire system. Disabling the protection would have degraded the batteries' maximum capacity within months.

Fernandez admitted plainly in the statement: "We are all well aware that the scope of the project was too ambitious for us, way more than we anticipated... This high dependency of external providers, due to our lack of experience in the industrial sector, together with the very limited resources that we had and a big component of bad luck in key moments, have definitely brought the project to this situation." While the company noted it had issued some refunds using private investor money, those funds had dried up, leaving remaining backers to fill out a tracking form waiting on the potential liquidation of company assets.

Just two months later, on July 15, 2021, Valve officially unveiled the Steam Deck at a starting price of $399. When it shipped in February 2022, Valve solved every single problem that had buried the Smach Z:

• Custom Silicon: Instead of relying on off-the-shelf 15W embedded boards or underpowered tablet chips, Valve partnered directly with AMD to build the custom "Aerith" APU (Zen 2 + RDNA 2) tailored for a 4W–15W handheld envelope.
• Software Maturity: Instead of forcing users to choose between an unsupported Windows 10 install or a barren 2014 Linux library, Valve shipped SteamOS 3.0 backed by Proton, allowing thousands of Windows-compiled DirectX games to run seamlessly on Linux without developer porting.
• Supply Chain Scale: Valve had the capital, internal hardware engineering veterans (forged by the failures and lessons of the Steam Controller and Valve Index), and manufacturing leverage to pass FCC/CE compliance, manage battery thermals, and subsidize a $399 entry price.

What Windows Handheld Enthusiasts Can Learn from the Smach Z​

Today, whether you are gaming on a Steam Deck OLED, an ASUS ROG Ally X running Windows 11, or a Lenovo Legion Go, it is easy to take portable PC architecture for granted. We complain when Windows 11's desktop taskbar feels clunky on a 7-inch touchscreen or when a modern AAA title dips below 40 FPS at 15W.

The seven-year saga of the SteamBoy and Smach Z is a sobering reminder that a cool 3D render and an enthusiastic crowdfunding video are the easiest 1% of building a PC handheld. The remaining 99% is brutal thermal engineering, custom PCB layout, BIOS development, battery management controller tuning, regulatory compliance, and supply chain logistics. The Spanish team behind the Smach Z genuinely saw the future of portable Steam gaming back in 2014—they just didn't have the silicon, the software translation layer, or the industrial muscle to build it.