It’s hard to believe that roughly 13 years ago, Valve debuted its hilarious first-person puzzle game, Portal, on The Orange Box for Windows, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Since then, there’s been a void in physics-based teleportation, robot-blasting puzzle/action games—except for Portal 2, of course—due to Valve having a strong distaste for sequels ending with the number 3. Sequels to games that will never surface aside, Valve was long-rumored to have been working on a prequel title to the original Portal called F-Stop, or Aperture Camera, which was eventually canceled in favor of a Portal 2 release. Well, here we are, in the dawn of a brand new decade, and an indie studio named LunchHouse Software has somehow managed to nab permission from Valve to show off footage and concept of F-Stop, the scrapped Portal prequel we’ll never be able to play, using its source code.
Rather than giving players a gun that shoots teleportation portals, F-Stop involves a camera that would grant players the ability to take snapshots of items and then resize and duplicate them to escape each testing room. The game promised to expand on Aperture Science lore, with the idea of the prequel giving player another cool first-person physics-based puzzler revolving around a single tool. With the okay from Valve, LunchHouse Software has been able to take some video using the game’s source code to show off some of F-Stop’s ideas and gameplay. They’ll be uploading more footage in the next coming weeks in a video series called Exposure.
How did LunchHouse Software get permission from Valve to create this video? Tristian Halcomb of LunchHouse Software is keeping that a secret.
Will we ever be able to play it?
Probably not.