The Portal prequel F-Stop has leaked. The playable version of the canceled Valve game from 2007 has appeared online, thanks to the community that compiled it from three different leaks. According to players, the build is about 99 percent complete.
What F-Stop Was Supposed to Be
F-Stop was developed in 2007 during a three-month period when Valve divided developers into five teams as part of the so-called Directed Design Experiments. The game did not focus on portals but rather on an experimental camera from Aperture Science. Players captured objects in photos and placed them elsewhere, or solved puzzles using perspective.
According to Kotaku, Gabe Newell was very excited about F-Stop, but playtesters did not share that enthusiasm. As a result, the project was canceled, and some dialogues, characters, and mechanics were later reworked into Portal 2.
Portal Prequel F-Stop Leaked in Three Waves
Most of the assets come from a massive data leak from Steam that occurred this August. The Verge and TechPowerUp report 12 terabytes, while Kotaku and tbreak mention about 13 terabytes. The source code and map data were missing at that time.
The last missing pieces appeared on the Discord server of the Valve Cut Content project. According to the moderators of the server, the person who originally offered mapsrc first wanted $1,000 but ultimately released it for free.
A Few Textures and Dialogues Are Missing
Players report that the assembled version is nearly complete. Only a few assets, textures, and dialogue lines are missing. The entire campaign playthrough takes just under an hour, which corresponds to a short experiment.
The TechPowerUp server noted that an early Cave Johnson appears in the game, speaking to players but without the voice of J.K. Simmons. Personality cores serve as companions in solving puzzles.
Valve has not commented on the project yet, and there is no indication that the game will be officially released.