F-Stop, Valve’s cancelled 2007 Portal prequel, has leaked online–and yes, it’s fully playable. If you’ve heard of F-Stop, you don’t need me to tell you why this is a huge deal. But if you haven’t, then you’re in for quite the history lesson.
In 2007, Valve spent three months on a project that Gabe Newell would later dub the Directed Design Experiments. Now, I’m not going to attempt to tell the story better than the folks at the Half-Life wiki have before, so here’s the short version: during these three months, Valve broke off into five teams. Each team designed and partially created a video game “experiment,” and the fifth was dubbed “F-Stop.”
F-Stop was conceptualised as a prequel to Portal, and the gameplay revolved around using an experimental Aperture Science camera to mess with perspectives and solve puzzles. Gabe Newell himself was very taken with the project, but playtesters were less thrilled. Ultimately, F-Stop was scrapped, and some of its dialogue, characters, and mechanics were reworked into Portal 2.
Well, consider it scrapped no longer, as thanks to the efforts of several leakers and the Valve Cut Content team, F-Stop is now playable in (almost) its entirety.
If you’re curious as to how this leaked, the long answer is that it’s actually a combination of three separate leaks. Some of you might remember that in late August, roughly 13 terabytes of Steam depot data leaked online. The leak, dubbed Steam2, seemingly contained almost every Steam depot from 2003 to 2013 and, most surprisingly, assets for F-Stop.
However, while the Steam2 leak included the majority of F-Stop’s assets, it did not include F-Stop’s source code or its mapsrc data (Valve’s folder name for its map source code data). It appears both of these final pieces of the F-Stop puzzle were leaked via the Valve Cut Content project’s Discord server over the past 48 hours.
According to the mods in the server, the person who leaked the F-Stop mapsrc initially asked for $1,000, but, for whatever reason, just ended up giving them away for free anyway. The Valve Cut Content team has verified the map files’ authenticity, and the community has combined all three of the puzzle pieces into the end result: a fully playable version of F-Stop.
Those who have played it are reporting that while there appear to be a few missing assets and dialogue lines here and there, it’s essentially 99 percent complete. Unsurprising, as I’m sure Valve would have added a little more polish if they ever planned to release this officially, but hey, let’s be real–“99 percent complete” is a hell of a lot more than the 0 percent complete we had this time last week.
