Leaks are almost always amusing when they aren’t happening to you. No one wants their boat to go down, yet no one can look away when someone is hurriedly running around with a bucket scooping out water. In this case, the poor captain going down with its ship is Valve, who has suffered one of the most significant asset leaks in the company’s history.
So in case you don’t know, and I’m hoping you don’t, and that’s why you came here yesterday, a series of asset repositories for games like Portal, Counter Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half Life 2: Episodes 1 & 2, Half-Life 2 multiplayer, and Team Fortress 2 ended up online.
The leak is in the form of asset repositories, which is pretty much how files would be bundled up when sent to an external partner. While nothing included in this leak is overly earth-shattering, it is fun for fans and modders to look through and see what might have been. All of the assets date from 2016 and are abandoned/cut content.
The story of how the files ended up leaked is very darkly exciting for this early in the year and originated from a Discord account run by a user called WandererLeaker. Before punching the hole in Valve’s boat, the leaker used Discord to write:
“I don’t care anymore. I also did my toying around with it for a few years but did not upload it because I was threatened every time. A real shame. I have no legal binding to these files. Not anymore. I have held onto these files since 2016”.
The files in question are all asset repositories, and the Team Fortress 2 file alone is 61GB. There are tons of never before seen maps, models, taunts and everything else you could imagine in this file. If you want to browse through the files, you can follow the link below. But be warned, what’s been seen can’t be unseen.