12 TB Leak Uncovers Abandoned Half-Life 2: Episode 3 Material

A trove of data exceeding 12 terabytes has leaked online, containing builds of practically every game that was uploaded to Steam between 2003 and 2013. The archive is so vast that no one has yet catalogued its full contents — researchers have only just begun sifting through this mountain of files, and new discoveries keep surfacing.

What's turned up so far

Valve's material has drawn particular interest. Among the finds are assets tied to the cancelled Half-Life 2: Episode 3, cut content from Portal 2, and a build of a game called F-Stop — a project set in the Portal universe built around camera mechanics rather than the familiar portal gun.

The Portal 2 discoveries are perhaps the most intriguing. Diggers unearthed deleted dialogue capable of completely changing how a player feels about the Companion Cubes, alternate takes on the intro and on GLaDOS scenes, as well as a version of the Weaponizer that was intended for Episode 3.

Not just Valve

The archive isn't limited to Valve's games. It also contains projects from third-party studios: early versions of Call of Duty and Resident Evil, builds of Mirror's Edge, Batman: Arkham Asylum and Dragon Age: Origins. Given the scale of the leak, more revelations are surely ahead — combing through this much data will take a good while.

For Half-Life fans, the finds sound almost like a dispatch from a parallel reality: the third episode, which fans waited on for more than a decade, remained an unwritten chapter — and now its fragments have suddenly ended up in plain sight for everyone.

Source: The Verge