F-StopValve canceled 2007 Portal prequel, has leaked online – and yes, it’s fully playable. If you have heard of F-Stopyou don’t need me to tell you why this is a big deal. But if not, you’re in for a real history lesson.
In 2007, Valve spent three months on a project that Gabe Newell would later name Directed Design Experiments. Now, I’m not going to try to tell the story better than the people at Half-life wiki I already have, so here’s the short version: During those three months, Valve split into five teams. Each team designed and partially created a video game “experience” and the fifth was named “F-Stop.”
F-Stop was conceptualized as a prequel to Portaland gameplay revolved around using an experimental Aperture Science camera to play with perspectives and solve puzzles. Gabe Newell himself was very impressed with the project, but the testers were less enthusiastic. Eventually, F-Stop was abandoned and some of its dialogue, characters and mechanics were reworked in Portal 2.
Well, don’t consider it abandoned anymore, because thanks to the efforts of several leakers and Valve Cut Content Team, F-Stop is now playable in (almost) its entirety.
If you’re curious how this leak came about, the long answer is that it’s actually a combination of three separate leaks. Some of you may remember that at the end of August, approximately 13 terabytes of data from the Steam repository leaked online. The leak, dubbed Steam2, apparently contained almost every Steam repository from 2003 to 2013 and, more surprisingly, assets for F-Stop.
However, even though the Steam2 leak affected the majority of F-Stop active, he did not understand F-Stop the source code or its mapsrc data (the name of Valve’s folder for its map source code data). It seems that these last two pieces of the F-Stop puzzle were leaked via the Valve Cut Content Project Discord server in the last 48 hours.
According to server mods, the person who leaked the F-Stop mapsrc initially asked for $1,000, but for some reason ended up offering them for free anyway. The Valve Cut Content team verified the authenticity of the map files and the community combined the three pieces of the puzzle to achieve the final result: a fully playable version of F-Stop.
Those who have played it report that while there seem to be a few missing elements and lines of dialogue here and there, the game is essentially 99% complete. This isn’t surprising, as I’m sure Valve would have added a bit more polish if they were planning to officially release it, but hey, let’s be real: “99% Complete” is a lot more than the 0% Complete we had this time last week.
Gn tech
