Here at Ars, we're intimately familiar with data leaks surrounding Valve's games, hardware, and the workings of Steam itself. 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 and 2013.

What's being sold as an "as-complete-as-possible ... content server dump" of Steam's defunct "Steam2" server architecture from that time period is now circulating around via a BitTorrent tracker that Valve seems unlikely to ever completely purge from the Internet. The massive collection includes thousands of "depots" 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 updated its content distribution system from "Steam2" to the current SteamPipe system. In moving from a proprietary file distribution format to standard HTTP file trees, the new system removed various update approval bottlenecks on Valve's end and streamlined update and patch downloads so they only reflected file differentials.

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© Valve / HL_Alyx_NoVR

It’s quite likely that many readers will have harbored dreams of owning, or at least driving, a steam engine of some kind. [James Hervey-Bathurst] was lucky enough to do so in a time when it was still possible to find scrap steam-powered machinery for restoration, and at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK he took the time to describe his journey from finding an abandoned steam lorry in a Buckinghamshire field in 1975, to a few years later, taking it to the road.

The talk starts with the story of its retrieval, then the long process of rebuilding, and finally its first run. He’s the owner of Eastnor Castle, the ancestral pile that serves as venue for EMF Camp, so we’re guessing that having somewhere spacious for such a project must have helped. Along the way, we get a comprehensive run through the workings of a 1920s steam vehicle, from its double-expansion compound engine to its three-speed gearbox, stopping for small details like its injectors, and a curious exhaust steam heater designed to reduce the clouds of visible steam.

Most of us will never get the chance to take the wheel of a Foden such as this one, but at least we’ve had a chance for a closer look thanks to EMF. The full video is below the break, meanwhile if you’d like more on steam injectors we have you covered.

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