Valve’s Elusive F-STOP

What happened to the top-secret cousin of the Portal Gun?

Valve’s Portal and Portal 2 are thought to be some of the best games ever made (let alone among the best puzzle-platformers ever created). With their new flagship VR title — Half-Life: Alyx — on the way, quite a few gamers are rightly wondering about the future of the Portal franchise.

For many Portal enthusiasts, discussion around the game’s scrapped mechanics has always been both fascinating and shrouded in mystery. The conundrum became just a little clearer recently thanks to LunchHouse Software, which created a video series called Exposure. The series is being developed with permission from Valve, and the plan is to document exactly how the fabled F-STOP (or Aperture Camera) works. Take a look:

There’s a lot more to this mechanic than what is shown in the video. Even so, I’ve seen many projects explore this clone-and-scale mechanic, and it’s easy to see why it was cut. Interestingly though, Valve aren’t the only studio to have considered employing this mechanic.