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Everything Discovered In The 13TB Steam Leak So Far

News RoomBy 9 Mins Read
Everything Discovered In The 13TB Steam Leak So Far

At some point on August 29, roughly 13 terabytes of Steam depot data leaked online. It’s not an exaggeration to say that it is quite possibly the largest video game-related leak ever, as it contains prototype builds for an absurd number of games, including several first-party Valve releases like Portal 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Left 4 Dead 2.

The full scope of the content included in the “Steam2” leak is hard to get a handle on at the moment, as people aren’t even finished cataloging all of its contents yet. What does appear to be the case, however, is that the depot files date from 2003 to 2013, and the nearly 13-terabyte torrent file going around contains builds of both third-party games and Valve’s own first-party titles.

As far as third-party games are concerned, there’s not a ton of concrete info out there yet. That’s probably because many people are currently busy poring over all of the content discovered just in the Valve prototype builds. To that end, here’s what’s been uncovered so far, keeping in mind that this story will definitely develop further over the next couple of weeks.

Half-Life Content

All right, let’s get this one out of the way first: before you get too excited, nobody has discovered a playable build of either Half-Life 3 or Half-Life 2: Episode 3 in this leak. However, while no mythical prototype build of either game has popped up, that doesn’t mean that the leak is fully devoid of Half-Life content.

The main discovery here is a model for Half-Life 2: Episode 3’s “weaponizer” gun. For context, in 2011, a few filenames related to Half-Life 2: Episode 3 leaked, including an “icegun,” a “flamethrower,” and three separate instances of a “weaponizer.” At the time, said discovery wasn’t that big of a deal—but then, Valve released the Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Documentary in 2024.

And, lo and behold, it featured a few clips of weapons that were set to appear in Half-Life 2: Episode 3, including the aforementioned Ice Gun and a brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip of an unnamed weapon that the community believes is the fabled Weaponizer. This model pops up in the Portal 2 prototype build, although it appears to be a placeholder for a scrapped Paint Gun. There are also unconfirmed reports of filenames appearing in an “ep3” depot, but take those with a grain of salt for now.

The Portal 2 Prototypes

Speaking of Portal 2, the discovery of at least two prototype builds of Valve’s 2011 game in the Steam2 files is easily the juiciest part of the leak so far. The 2009 version of the Portal 2 prototype is pretty rough, but if you’re a fan of concept versions of unfinished cutscenes and placeholder models, then you might find digging through this one interesting. For instance, here’s a very early version of the game’s intro sequence from the 2009 build.

There’s also some fun, silly stuff in here, like this random picture of a rat that appears when you open a specific door, and a cut line of dialogue in which GLaDOS refers to itself as Chell’s “mother.”

The truly fascinating stuff is in the 2010 build. This build contains working, albeit somewhat unfinished, versions of three scrapped Portal 2 mechanics: Adhesive Gel, the Paint Gun, and a slo-mo, bullet-time mechanic.

Interestingly, we’ve known about both the Adhesive Gel and the Paint Gun since Portal 2 first released, as you can hear the devs chatting about them in the game’s developer commentary mode. But this is the first time we’ve properly seen them in action, and while I understand why the devs chose to cut them from the final game…I gotta say, walking on walls using the Adhesive Gel does look cool as hell.

Likewise, the slow-motion mechanic featured in the clip above looks fun to mess around with, and I think it’s interesting that this mechanic was so fully realized before being scrapped, as the devs even slowed down the sound effects when you trigger it.

Early Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Builds

There’s a lot of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive stuff floating around at the moment, to the point that I couldn’t discern exactly how many different builds of the game have been discovered. At minimum, it seems as if there are three separate prototype builds of the game, but all three appear to be quite similar.

According to those who are tirelessly digging through them, the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive builds feature PS3 and Xbox 360 icons, which implies that these builds are most likely work-in-progress ports. There are a few scrapped models in one of the builds too, including one of a woman.

Plus, there is the extremely clean scrapped version of the HUD featured in the video above, which also showcases several cut weapon animations.

Oh, and at least one build features “family guy ragdoll physics,” which is honestly too funny not to include. Kind of wish this also made its way into the final version of the game.

However, Counter-Strike fans will probably find all of the scrapped maps featured in one of the later builds to be the most fascinating part of the leak. As Slippi explains in their post on X, a few of these cut maps appear to be directly inspired by similar maps in the original Left 4 Dead.

That being said, the maps don’t look like straight-up copies to me, but more akin to recreations. If that is indeed the case, it’s curious that Valve chose to scrap them—although most Counter-Strike players would probably have only played them once before queuing into de_dust for the billionth time.

Left 4 Dead 2

Similarly, I’m not sure how many different Left 4 Dead 2 prototype builds are knocking around, but it seems there are at least two. Unfortunately, these builds are reportedly pretty buggy and will always crash at specific points in certain levels. The discoveries so far are also not quite as juicy as anything in the previous entries in this list.

Still, there’s a handful of curiosities in here. For instance, you could jump a lot higher in the prototype builds. Also, the placeholder audio in the Dark Carnival level’s concert section is admittedly very funny. Headphone users, beware: the audio in the clip below is super loud.

Another interesting tidbit is that the majority of Left 4 Dead’s maps are present in the Left 4 Dead 2 builds, which means you can play through them with Left 4 Dead 2’s survivors if you really want. I’d wager these were only left in for testing purposes, but still cool to see.

Valve’s Canceled F-Stop

If you’re not a huge Valve fan, you may never have heard of F-Stop. If you are a huge Valve fan, every synapse in your brain probably just collectively fired at once.

F-Stop is a canceled prequel to Portal—sort of, anyway. If you’re interested in the extended explanation, I highly suggest reading through the Half-Life wiki page on the subject. If not, here’s the short version: in 2007, Valve essentially spent three months performing the game development equivalent of jazz, in a project Gabe Newell dubbed “the Directed Design Experiments.”

The team messed around with five different concepts for games, one of which was dubbed F-Stop. The team envisioned it as a prequel to Portal, and the gameplay consisted of taking pictures and then scaling them in unique ways to solve puzzles. In short, it sounds a lot like the game Superliminal. According to Newell, everyone thought that F-Stop was so cool that they wanted to make it into a full game. The entire project was ultimately scrapped, however, and we got Portal 2 instead.

Unfortunately, a prototype version of F-Stop isn’t featured anywhere in the leak. However, a few F-Stop assets have been discovered within one of the Portal 2 prototypes.

This makes a lot of sense. Newell has stated before that F-Stop’s brief development did inspire some of Portal 2’s puzzles, and that a few of the assets from the scrapped game were used for testing purposes during Portal 2’s development. If you want something super juicy though, look no further than the clip below.

That’s an almost 10-minute-long placeholder version of Cave Johnson dialogue, ripped from one of the Portal 2 prototypes in the leak. However, said dialogue isn’t for Portal 2; it’s for F-Stop. How do we know that’s the case? Because Cave Johnson instructs the player to pick up “the Aperture Science Spirit Camera” and “take pictures” of his “big old butt.”

It’s good to get a brief glimpse of what Valve was cooking in 2007, but painful to learn that, had things gone differently, we might have gotten to hear Cave Johnson’s voice actor, J. K. Simmons, instructing us to take pics of his juicy behind. Oh, what could have been…

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