So about that Portal 2 2009 beta...

September 8, 2026 / 3:51 PM
Tags: Video Games >>

At the end of August, a massive 13TB leak of Valve's old Steam2 servers came out, and one of the most interesting parts of it to me was the 2009 beta build of Portal 2.

I got a fixed copy of the build and played it a few days ago. Let's talk about it.

The main differences between the 2009 build and the final 2011 release are the story (from what we can gather) and the art direction.

Many of the chambers in this build are chambers that did make it into the final release. For example: this chamber from chapter 8 of the final game?

It was in the 2009 beta, just without Wheatley's giant screen in the corner of the room, the frankenturrets, and the exit door was on the bottom of the map, instead of the top. Many of the laser and hard light bridge chambers from the final game are also in the 2009 beta. When I say the art direction was different, the art style of the game leans more on the Portal 1 style. This would be expected, since they were building off the base of Portal 1 for this beta (Portal 1 is playable within the beta's folder).

The story was going to be very different from Portal 2's final version. Since the 2009 build was never finished (it ends on a BBC station error screen with the smooth jazz track), we can't really see what the full version of it was going to look like. It seems like GLaDOS was going to have amnesia after Mel (originally, Chell was not going to be the protagonist) reactivates her, and Mel would have gone and collected all of GLaDOS's old cores, hence the name of that era being "Corehub".

Something I'd like to note is that Wheatley did not exist in this era of the game. There is a British core that you collect (known as the Paranoia Core?), but I do not believe he was ever meant to be Wheatley.

As well as many of the 2010 and 2011 builds being part of the Steam2 leak, in the 2009 build, many of the assets from f-Stop (a cancelled Portal game) were in the files of the build. We basically have everything from f-Stop, minus the maps. The old Cave Johnson voice lines and old mannequin models are in there. The menu screen for the 2009 beta build is believed to be an f-Stop leftover that was used as a placeholder image. It's a little creepy to be honest...

I just know that 11 year old Nikki would have been absolutely ecstatic about the leaks. I am ecstatic now, but since I'm older, I'm a lot more calm that I would have been back then. I haven't looked at any of the 2010 builds, but I 100% wanted to look at the 2009 build more, since it is so different tonally and and in art direction. This is basically the last time we'll get any Portal content that is new to us (despite just being reheated leftovers from development).

~Nikki