Valve stops Portal 64 demake in its tracks
In a surprising move, two popular projects based on Valve titles have received notices from the developer asking that they be taken down.
12th Jan 2024 20:30
Images via Valve
Valve stops Portal 64 demake in its tracks
In a surprising move, two popular projects based on Valve titles have received notices from the developer asking that they be taken down.
12th Jan 2024 20:30
Images via Valve
In a surprising move, two popular projects based on Valve titles have received notices from the developer asking that they be taken down.
One of these community projects is Portal 64, an N64 demake of portal, which has reportedly been removed as it "depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries."
The popular Portal 64 demake has been removed after receiving a notice from Valve
Portal 64 is a demake which aims to bring the fan-favourite Valve title, Portal, to the Nintendo 64 console.
The project has been in development for almost two years, with the first video posted by Lambert, within which he showed a demo of the game on N64 hardware, being released in March 2022.
Almost two weeks ago, James Lambert, the creator of Portal 64, shared a video announcing that Portal 64: The First Slice was out of beta and available for download.
This did not last long however as Lambert had to take the project down after being contacted by Valve.
In a message on his Patreon, Lambert wrote: "So I have been in communication with Valve about the future of the project.
"There is some news and it isn't good. Because the project depends on Nintendo's proprietary libraries, they have asked me to take the project down."
Whether it was the release of the ROM download that triggered Valve’s response or just that it has only just become aware of the project, it is a tragic loss of an exciting project.
Portal 64 isn’t the only project affected
However, it seems that Portal 64 wasn’t the only project affected by Valve’s recent crackdown on community projects as Team Fortress: Source 2 was sent a DMCA notice to be taken down.
In a twitter thread, the Team Fortress: Source 2 account said: “Hello everyone. We have some unfortunate news to share with you.
“Today, we received a DMCA takedown from Valve on all our public GitHub repositories and all its forks made by the community.
“While we were discussing the project's future internally recently, we already came to the conclusion to stop the development of the project due to the current state of the code being unusable anymore with s&box's recent major engine changes, and that we overall moved on from it.
“Sadly, this means this DMCA takedown is the nail in the coffin. We cannot bring it back and we've hit Valve's attention, it seems like they definitely don't want us to use their IP (which is totally fair and legal from them).
“From the bottom of our hearts at Amper, it's been an honour to grow this project with all of you and the incredible team behind. We cannot be thankful enough for all your support and enthusiasm over the last 3 years. We're so happy we got this far.”
This is a contrast to how Valve treated Portal: Revolution, which debuted on Steam last week, and was reviewed and approved by Valve itself.
About The Author
Megan Cooke
Megan is GGRecon's Evening & Weekend News Writer. She has an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing and is working towards finishing her masters in Journalism. When she isn’t writing about games she can be found reading romance novels or playing cosy games like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, APICO, and Disney Dreamlight Valley.
