Developed by Valve, Portal can be called one of the most iconic puzzle games in gaming history. Although the third installment in the series is still nowhere in sight, just like many of Valve’s IPs, recently F-Stop, a canceled prequel to the Portal series, suddenly began leaking online and has even reached a playable state.
In 2007, Valve spent three months on a development project that CEO Gabe Newell called “Directed Design Experiments,” splitting its development team into five different groups, each responsible for developing an experimental game, and F-Stop was the fifth game in this project.
At the time, Valve designed F-Stop as a prequel to the original Portal, with gameplay centered on an experimental camera device built by Aperture Science that let players solve puzzles by manipulating space—for example, materializing photographed objects to achieve the effect of moving objects at a distance. Although Gabe Newell himself was quite interested in the project, unfortunately the players who tested it at the time didn’t seem to buy into it as much. In the end, Valve chose to cancel F-Stop’s development and made large-scale adjustments to the dialogue, characters, and game mechanics originally designed for this prequel, eventually carrying them over into the proper sequel Portal 2, released in 2011.
But after nearly 20 years of being shelved, F-Stop has finally resurfaced thanks to the efforts of multiple leakers and the Valve Cut Content team, reaching a level of completeness that allows it to be played almost from start to finish.
As for how this canceled experimental project actually leaked? The matter may be more complicated than imagined, and could even be attributed to several different leak incidents. In late August this year, Valve experienced a large-scale data breach, when a batch of Steam Depot data called “Steam2,” totaling 13TB, began leaking online. The content is said to include all of Valve’s Depot data from 2003 to 2013, and it included quite a bit of content from F-Stop.
However, even though the Steam2 leak contained most of F-Stop’s game assets, it was missing the project’s source code and the “mapsrc” folder Valve used to store map source data. Then, last weekend, the last remaining pieces of the puzzle were finally filled in through a leak from a Discord server.
According to the administrator of the server “Valve Cut Content,” the person who originally leaked the F-Stop mapsrc data initially asked for $1,000 before providing the files, but for some reason eventually decided to release the related content publicly for free. The Valve Cut Content team also confirmed the authenticity of these map files, and the community subsequently succeeded in integrating the data obtained from these waves of leaks, ultimately creating this fully playable version of F-Stop.
After actually conducting playtests, players found that although the game still seems to be missing a few assets and some dialogue, its overall completion has basically reached 99%. This isn’t really surprising; after all, if Valve had truly intended to officially release this title back then, it would presumably have done some additional polishing of the details. But compared with the 0% progress at the same time last week, shooting all the way up to “99% completion” in one go is already an incredibly insane development.
Source: KOCPC Chinese