12TB Steam 'teraleak' exposes a decade of lost PC gaming history
A 12TB Steam "teraleak" spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history
A massive 12TB leak from Valve's old Steam2 servers has surfaced, containing thousands of game builds from 2003 to 2013, including pre-release and prototype versions. Fans have already unearthed cut content from Portal 2, hints of Half-Life 2: Episode 3, and early builds of games like Spore and Batman: Arkham Asylum. The leak appears to have been obtained via a publicly accessible API endpoint, raising questions about Valve's security and the legal implications for third-party publishers.
It was there for everyone to download. No passwords. Nothing. Hidden in plain sight, but with no protection whatsoever.
- mister_mort
I think the most interesting thing I've seen from these leaks are the Portal 2 beta content videos. The temporary time-slow mechanic and the beta voice acting have been really interesting to see. The time slow mechanic in particular could have made the game a lot more accessible to gamers with slow reflexes and refocused the game on the puzzle elements.
- haunter
Yeah the long forgotten Steam release of League of Legends is also in the files (it was only available for like 5 months)
Might not be the most interesting game in the leak but old versions of live service games are almost impossible to come by
https://steamdb.info/app/20590/
Downloaded it to extract all the old assets but it still needs an encrypted depot key
>error!! -- extract: missing depot key!, pass --key if you know it though
Some people reported that "--key 0000000000000000" or "--key 0" works on some depots... well not here
- zetalyrae
Tangential, but it's interesting to me that there are "Valve watchers", people who are big on social media for doing Valve analysis and kremlinology. Humans are so cool.
- xnx
- giov4
If it will be really seeded forever that would be a great way of archiving for posterity!
btw interestingly from the leak homepage:
"To the operators of browsers/indexers: please look into caching or mirroring the blobs, as a large volume of requests at this point are coming from these, which seem to be impacting downloads for everyone. It's a 15 GB directory that would save the time of many people. Many people should have them all downloaded by now.
We are facing pretty severe link oversaturation. If you managed to download something please try seeding them on the torrent and/or sharing the original files on third party services to spare us some load. The more torrent seeds the faster and more viable it shall be."