Valve Ghosted a Free Portal Remake That Took 15 Years

Fifteen years. That's how long the team at Rhubarb & Rhubarb has spent building Portal: Alive & Kicking, a full remake of the original Portal using Portal 2's Source engine. The game is finished. It's free. And Valve, the company that gave the developers access to Portal 2's source code in the first place, has apparently stopped responding to their messages.

"The game is done, but we do not have the ability to release it on Steam right now," developer Dot Operator wrote on the project's Steam discussions page. "I have not had any updates from Valve since filling out a non-commercial license template a few months ago. I am grateful they initially gave us that option, but now we aren't hearing anything."

The situation is bizarre. Valve originally supported the project, granting the team access to Portal 2's source code under NDA. What wasn't signed at the time was a non-commercial release form, which Dot Operator says was filed more recently. Since submitting that paperwork, silence. No approval, no rejection, no acknowledgement. The team can't even release the mod outside of Steam without that license, because the modified source code requires Valve's sign-off either way. "If they don't respond there, I don't have anywhere else to send requests as far as I know," Dot Operator added.

Valve's own playbook says yes

This is a company that hired the creators of Counter-Strike, Dota, and Team Fortress and turned their mods into billion-dollar franchises. Portal itself started as a student project by Kim Swift before Valve brought her team in to ship it as part of The Orange Box in 2007. And as recently as 2020, Valve approved Black Mesa, the fan-made Half-Life remake by Crowbar Collective, to launch on Steam as a paid product. Alive & Kicking isn't even asking to charge money. It's a free remake of a 19-year-old game, built with tools Valve handed over willingly. The precedent for approving this is overwhelming, which makes the radio silence all the more confusing.

Fans have started trying to force the issue. A post on the game's subreddit, as reported by The Gamer, urged the community to make noise. "The developers' hands are tied by the NDA, and Valve is just sitting on a finished game," the poster wrote. "Spamming support doesn't work, but making a public noise might."

I don't understand what the holdup is here. Valve has every reason to approve this and no obvious reason not to. A free, non-commercial remake of a beloved classic, built by fans who followed every rule Valve set? That's the easiest yes in corporate history. The Steam page for Alive & Kicking has been up since the project was announced, promising the original's puzzles rebuilt in Portal 2's engine alongside potential new test chambers. Everything is ready. The only thing missing is a response from Valve, and the developers have been waiting since March.