[STEAM] A 12TB Steam “teraleak” spills more than a decade of lost PC gaming history

[Steam 0]

Here at Ars, we're

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with

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surrounding Valve's

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,

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, and

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. But nothing could have prepared us for this weekend's "terarelease" encompassing more than 12TB of content related to seemingly every title available on Steam between 2003 to 2013.

What's being sold as an "as-complete-as-possible ... content server dump" of Steam's defunct "Steam2" server architecture from that time ******* is now circulating around via a BitTorrent tracker that Valve seems unlikely to ever completely purge from the Internet. The massive collection includes

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representing what seems to be every version of every game uploaded to those old Steam2 servers. That includes public release builds, of course, but in many cases also covers previously unseen pre-release, prototype, and playtest versions of popular titles published by Valve and third-party Steam publishers.

Steam2: Electric Boogaloo

The reason this weekend's leaked content cuts off abruptly in 2013 is because that's when Valve

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. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system

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on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials.

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